The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (2 page)

The sunlight slanted through the screen of the porch, warming her face and bringing the gradual knowledge that she was somewhere strange and that her neck was now very sore. She sat up slowly. Several parts of her body ached from a night on the wood floor. Her feet in particular, and the backs of her heels. She stepped over the heap of quilt and marched into the house, letting the screen door whap shut behind her. Inside the doorway, though, she stopped and stood.

In the morning light, the kitchen looked as if someone had cut its angles out with left-handed scissors, and it smelled like cat food and old bleach, or damp, many-eyed potatoes. Jory walked slowly from the wide double sink to the prehistoric gas stove, and then to the linoleum-topped kitchen table. She was supposed to live here in this place, in this peculiar old house that smelled like someone else’s cast-off life. She could feel herself breathing in an irregular way, as if she had to concentrate in order to make her lungs expand and relax.

She walked into the living room. Grace was lying on the dead cat couch still wearing her tennis shoes and snoring softly beneath the plaid blanket. The unopened boxes squatted in a circle around them. One of the boxes had a large paper sack on top that was leaking something pink
and white. A large blossom-colored pool had formed around the bag and was now dripping down the side of the box. Cherry vanilla. He’d always bought it for her when she was sick or sad. Once, when Jory had to have stitches, he brought the whole carton into her bedroom wrapped in a dishtowel and fed her one spoonful after another while he explained how scar tissue formed. How even the stars healed themselves. He had been wearing a tie with small green ducks on it.

Jory found one of her tennis shoes under the couch and the other near the front door. She crammed them onto her feet without untying the laces. After one glance back at her sister, she fled out the door and down the painted steps, the backs of her bruised heels burning like fire.

The road that led away from the house was lined with cottonwood trees, and little bits of the fluff blew all around her and clung to her hair as she strode fast and faster past weedy patches and fields of corn and late summer wheat. She passed a barn that had faded to an unidentifiable color. A large spotted dog lay panting in a strip of shade beneath the barn’s overhang. The dog inspected her; it raised its wedge-shaped head and blinked slowly, but did not get up. Jory kept walking. Once, she turned around to look behind her, and still, even at this distance, she could see the house’s diamond-shaped window winking at her in the late morning sun.

She hadn’t noticed the heat. The blood now hummed in her head as she marched along, kicking up spits of loose gravel. The flat string of road ran on ahead for as far as she could see, shimmering and wavering a little at its farthest point. Jory made a half-strangled noise deep in her throat and sat down hard next to the edge of the road. A drain ditch bristling with cattails rushed foamily past her feet.

The wind began to blow in short, dry little gusts that she could feel in the sweaty sections of her hair. A large crow sailed past and then landed clumsily on the thick stalk of a cattail. The bird maneuvered briefly, attempting to vary its grip in hopes of a stronger foothold, but quickly gave up and flapped on. Jory stood and peered toward the road. A rounded truck the color of curdled milk was coming toward her. She stared as it passed her, and then suddenly with a bump and a sigh it pulled off onto the road’s steep shoulder and came to a stop. She could hear a crow
squawking insistently somewhere overhead. The truck reversed gears and backed up slowly to the spot where she was standing.
AL’S FROZEN IC
E CREAM TREATS
,
the truck’s passenger side read.
TAST
Y AND DELICIOUS!
The man inside was already leaning across the seat to open the door. “Miss your bus?” he said, smiling. The truck’s front seat was high above her and she had to grab at the crease-hardened hand he offered down. With a powerful pull he hoisted her firmly up onto the cab’s slick vinyl seat.

“Well, hello there,” he said. He raked his blue-tattooed fingers through his ponytailed hair and made no move toward going anywhere.

Jory stared out through the windshield at the road she had just come down, and then behind her at the tiny diamond-windowed house nearly hidden in the trees. She could feel the back of her throat suddenly swelling hot and tight with tears. “Where have you been?” she whispered. “Where
were
you?”

“Well,” he said, “in between selling delicious ice cream treats, I’ve been busy scouring the landscape for
you
.” He rested his elbow on the seatback and with one finger pushed a stray strand of her hair behind her ear. For a second, neither of them moved. Then he reached out and pulled all of her past the gearshift and onto his lap. She sat sideways across his hard legs and leaned her head against his shirt, breathing in his smell. It was the same as always—engine grease and cigarette smoke and something unidentifiable that she always thought of as burned sugar. She closed her eyes. Through his chest she could hear him humming a song she didn’t know. He held her carefully with one arm and she could feel his muscles tense as he put the truck into gear and then steered them back out onto the road. He flicked the switch on the loudspeaker and as the truck jounced along music played above her like a carnival tune from a faraway fair, a tinkling gypsy music as strange as a blue tattoo. It followed them like a long holiday all the way down the road to wherever it was they were
going.

I
t was like this.

There was to be no mixed bathing, no circuses or bowling alleys or pool halls, no card playing (except Uno), no dancing or movie watching, no makeup or pierced ears or flashy jewelry or immodest dress of any kind. Men were to have short hair and women long and Joy was spelled Jesus and Others and then You. Some things were so taboo that no mention was even necessary: alcohol, premarital relations, and swearing.
Gosh
and
gee
and
Jiminy Christmas
were out, as were
fart
and
butt
. Sundays were for Sunday School and Junior Church and Bible Quizzing, not for working or going to the grocery store. It all sounded funny when she said it out loud, but really it wasn’t.

Jory had tried explaining this to several incredulous listeners when they were all in sixth grade at Eisenhower Elementary, and now she was glad to be going to Arco Christian Academy, where everyone already knew and understood and there was no need to discuss any of it over sloppy joes and fruit betty surprise. It had made her feel tired and squinty eyed to have to repeat why her mother wore her father’s Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain around her neck instead of wearing a diamond wedding ring, and why they had a bomb shelter in their garage instead of a car, and a ham radio antenna where the TV antenna should be, why they ate lentil loaf nearly every night and kept a refrigerator in the backyard full of nothing but apples, and why she and her sisters had all skipped first grade. There were way too many things to explain and no words for half of it. And for quite a while, when she was younger, she hadn’t known she would have to.

Her father was just her father, people had always called him Doctor, he had always gone to Harvard and discovered new moons and ridden his
old black bike to teach each day and run around their backyard twenty times each night still wearing his work shoes. And her mother was just her mother who didn’t work and didn’t drive and didn’t go anywhere or talk to anyone except at church and at the library, where she went twice a week to check out as many books as they would allow her and to place orders for new ones they hadn’t had the foresight to order themselves. This was just the way it was, the way they were and had been and would be forever. Like Polaris, the polestar that always pointed north, so were the five of them together: her father and mother and Grace and then Jory and Frances. The Quanbecks. No matter where Jory went or how she turned or where she was standing in the world, there they still were, unmoving, as the rest of the stars and planets whizzed past under the watchful gaze of God’s bright eye.

“I see you Jory!” Frances’s face was smashed against the back screen door. She licked the metal screen and then made a face. “
Yick
. It tastes like burned pennies. Come in and do Spanish with us.”

Jory held very still and said nothing.

“Come on. Grace made Spanish milk and Spanish oatmeal and Spanish bread and we have Spanish money to buy them with.” Frances disappeared for a moment, and reappeared holding up a colored bill that she flattened against the screen. “See?”

“Go on, Jory. You can help your sister for once.” Esther Quanbeck rinsed her daughters’ white Keds off with the irrigation hose, squirting each one clean with a blast of water that made the shoes jump and flip across the yard. “Jory,” she said, a little louder this time, “for the love of Pete, go on.”

“I’m tired of being the Mexican heathen woman. I already got baptized and bought groceries. Twice.”

Her mother straightened up. “Jory,” she said, “if you felt seriously about something, Grace would indulge
you
. Besides, you’re not doing anything important anyway.” Her mother turned and went back to the shoes, pinning them down with her bare long-nailed toe as she sprayed.

Jory let the back door slam shut behind her. Inside the garage—what
used
to be the garage—was the raised platform of the bomb shelter’s ton-
heavy door, an upright piano painted white that her mother had won at a church raffle for checking out the most missionary books, a large chalkboard, and several old-style wooden school desks, their metal legs all welded together in a row. Resting against the wall and strewn across the cement floor were Grace’s ten-speed bike, a pogo stick, three Hula-Hoops, a box of dress-up clothes, an old baby stroller, a hamster cage with Jory’s pet rat Ratfink inside, and several messy stacks of
Sky and Planet
,
Christianity Today
, and
Der Spiegel
. Frances was already seated in one of the school desks. “Sit by me,” Frances whispered, as if they really were in school, patting the wooden lid of the desk behind her. Jory slid into the desk and glared toward the front wall, where Grace was writing
“el pan”
in her careful up-and-down printing on the blackboard. With her back to them, Grace seemed like a tall dark-haired stranger—someone both regal and authoritative—not like anyone related to Jory at all.

Unlike Grace’s coffee-colored crop of hair, Jory’s was a golden blond, lighter on top and darker underneath. “Like winter wheat waving,” her mother had once said. Jory cherished this phrase since it was one of the few favorable things her mother had ever said about Jory’s appearance. Her eyes were not a deep brown like her mother’s. Frances had inherited those. Jory’s were the same mild sea blue as her father’s, while seventeen-year-old Grace seemed to have received an eye color from some far-distant relative—an uncle or cousin with eyes the color of steely gray marbles that seemed capable of sending out X-rays or purest radiation.

Grace turned and beamed at both of them.
“Buen día y recepción a la sala de clase española,”
she said. “Now, who can tell me what this is?” Grace held up the empty milk carton their mother had rinsed out and saved from the garbage for this very purpose.
“¿Cuál es éste?”

Frances waved her hand wildly. “Two percent!” she shrieked.

Grace’s smile wavered only slightly. “Jory, how about you?
¿Qué es?
”

“La leche,”
Jory muttered, slumping low in her seat.

“Excellente.”
Grace placed the cardboard carton onto Jory’s desk. It wobbled emptily for a second and then tipped over. Before she could right it, a thin trickle of whitish liquid ran across Jory’s desk and onto the floor. “Oh, shoot,” said Grace.

“No problemo,” said Jory, scrubbing at the wetness with her bare foot.

“Hey, that was Spanish,” said Frances, turning around to view the drippage.

Grace smiled. “Pretty close, Frances. And because you knew that, you get to go and get the paper towels.”

“Good grief—I’m not a complete moron, you know.” Frances stood up and marched inside.

Grace began to line up the other cans and cartons and boxes of foodstuffs on their card table. The week before, Grace had borrowed their father’s label maker and had carefully printed out a Spanish label for every box of spaghetti and powdered milk and can of chili and Campbell’s soup and Chicken of the Sea tuna. Even the pieces of fruit their mother had let Grace “borrow” were labeled with their new Spanish names. Each
manzanita
and
limón
had a sticky red label carefully applied to its skin. Jory picked up the can of Del Monte fruit cocktail. “What’s the word for
marshmallow
?”

Grace glanced up from her organizing. A tiny knot formed between her dark eyebrows. “How strange,” she said. “I’m not sure.” She stood still, thinking. “Maybe it’s
la mechoca
. Oh,” she said, after a second, “I don’t know it.”

Frances slammed the door between the laundry room and the garage. “Here,” she said, thrusting the roll of paper towels at Jory.

“You probably won’t need to know it anyway.” Jory wiped at the sticky spot on her desk. “It’s probably
el
marsh-a-mellow
or something.”

“No. I’m sure there’s a word for it. There’s a word for everything.” Grace stood perfectly still, her hand resting on a can of stewed tomatoes. “I have to go look it up.” She turned and opened the kitchen door, letting it fall shut behind her.

“Where’d she go?” Frances plunked down onto the piano stool and began twirling herself around.

Jory said nothing. She gazed down at the can of fruit cocktail she had in her hand and then felt underneath the edge of its label with her fingernail. She peeled back the corner of the label. With one quick flick the can became nameless. Or nameless in Spanish anyway. Jory picked up another can.

“Grace is going to kill you,” said Frances, who had stopped her twirling to watch.

“Me vale mierda.”
Jory pulled off the can’s label and tossed it onto the garage floor.

“I know what that means,” said Frances.

“Good for you,
idiota
,” said Jory. She wondered how long it would take Grace to notice that her hard work was being undermined—that her freakish obsession with becoming the world’s youngest evangelist was being sabotaged by a member of her own supposedly loyal camp.

Tonight the sky was covered by clouds, a long gray bank of them that spread thick and low against the Owyhees and seemed to weigh the air down so that when Jory breathed her head felt heavy as if she were balancing books on it, which of course she wasn’t.
A Girl of the Limberlost
was lying open on her lap to page forty-two, and she was sitting in her lawn chair in the front yard just like everyone else: her mother and father and Grace and Frances—they each had a lawn chair and a book. This is what all five of them did every night after dinner, except when it rained—then they sat indoors.

“Oh, my, will you look at that—just like ducks in a row—little to big.” Mrs. Reisenstein stood just outside their curb with Mr. Reisenstein, who was holding their ancient cocker spaniel, Penny, by a leash. They were both smiling.

Mr. Reisenstein shaded his eyes with one hand. “You Quanbecks sure are a reading bunch, aren’t you?” His grin widened expansively. “Must be something mighty interesting in all those books to keep you at it night after night.”

Jory didn’t need to look up to see her mother’s fierce, tight-lipped smile.

“Actually, Len and Patsy”—Grace pulled her sandaled feet out from under her and advanced with an enthusiastic spring toward their neighbors—“I’ve been reading a fascinating book called
Your God Is Too Small
, by J. B. Phillips. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

Grace called them Len and Patsy!
Jory could not look up, she could not. She held her breath and stared unblinking at the toes of her tennis shoes.

“It attempts to answer some of the fundamental questions that people have raised over the centuries about Christ and our relationship to Him. Something I’m sure you, like I, have thought long and hard about.”

Jory dared to peek at Grace out of the corner of her eye. Grace’s head was tilted slightly to one side, and she smiled as she waited. The Reisensteins were still standing at the curb, although Mrs. Reisenstein now had her hand tightly around her husband’s upper arm.

“Well, we were just heading to Albertsons for some ice cream, actually.” Mr. Reisenstein cleared his throat. He gave Penny’s leash a hopeful jingle.

Jory’s father stood up and moved over next to Grace. “We’re glad you stopped by,” he said. He smiled his slow smile and then held his hand up in a wave as the Reisensteins walked quickly away, dragging their dog behind them.

“
Really
, Grace.” Their mother shook her head, and no one said anything for a minute or two.

Grace sat back down in her chair and pulled the hems of her pedal pushers carefully over her knees. “I felt compelled to witness.”

“That’s perfectly fine.” Their father moved his chair closer to Grace’s and sat down in it with a sigh. “That’s a wonderful impulse.”

“They’re Jewish, Oren.” Their mother closed her eyes and leaned back in her lawn chair.

“They’re German,” said their father. “Reisensteins . . . Rolling Stones.”

“Rolling Stones?” said Jory.

“They’re German-Jewish,” said their mother.

“What’s
Jewish
?” Frances glanced from one parent to the other. “What is it? You mean like Jesus-Jewish?”