The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (3 page)

“Sort of,” their mother said.

“Not just sort of,” said Grace, sitting up. “They’re Jewish
exactly
like Jesus. The Jews were God’s chosen people, Franny, and even though Jesus was one of them, the Jews chose not to accept his messiahship. They think that Jesus was an impostor.”

“You mean the Reisensteins are going to hell?” Frances’s eyes grew wide.

“Yes,” said Grace. “I’m afraid they are.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said their mother.

“Well,” said their father, “I don’t know about you girls, but all that talk about ice cream has made me hungry.” He tried smiling.

No one smiled back.

“Is an impostor like a magician?”

Jory could hear the Tribletts’ Pekingese from down the block beginning to bark at something. It barked over and over on a one-note scale at perfectly timed intervals until suddenly a door slammed and someone yelled, “Shut up, goddammit!” and then everything was quiet again. The Quanbecks all gazed down at their books.

Jory continued to sit very still, silently turning pages without looking at them until her mother asked if someone would please turn the porch light on before they all went completely blind.

That night, as Jory lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, she listened to the sound of her father pounding around the oval-shaped track he was slowly wearing into their backyard.
Pound . . . pound . . . POUND
. She could hear him coming closer, running toward her window, and then suddenly past, as he curved by the plum tree and around the irrigation ditch and on toward the swing set. Their backyard was a quarter of an acre wide, and her father ran twenty times around the whole thing each night after he got home from his teaching job at Northwestern Bible College.

Jory flopped over on her mattress trying to find a softer, more comfortable spot. For someone who viewed the body merely as a temporary shelter for the soul, her father seemed to care a great deal about keeping his in good shape, whereas her mother cared not one iota. While her father did his twenty laps around the backyard, her mother lay on the couch reading historical biographies of Queen Victoria and Eleanor Roosevelt and filching Hershey’s Kisses out from between the couch cushions (which is where she kept them to “soften”). Jory was only vaguely embarrassed by her father’s running—although she was grateful he waited until dark to engage in this activity—but lately nearly everything about her mother’s body filled Jory with a certain alarm. It was so frighteningly female, with its overabundant breasts and hips, and its thighs and calves and upper arms seemingly made of floppy doll rubber. And when her mother wore culottes or skorts, which she frequently did in the summer, Jory couldn’t help thinking that her mother’s knees and thighs resembled
two Beluga whales threaded with undersea veins running tight and blue beneath their milky fat.

Jory was aware that it was only her own response that had shifted. Nothing about her mother was any different than it had ever been: her heart-shaped face with its dramatic widow’s peak and slightly pinched features that seemed to expect, if not invite, disappointment, her permanently chapped lips that lent her mouth a pinkish rosy tint and made her appear to be wearing lipstick even though she hardly ever was. The few times Jory had seen old photographs of her mother she had been shocked to discover a lithe and coquettish girl seated provocatively on the car hood of a ’49 Packard, her hair a mass of golden brown curls and her tightish pants rolled up above her knees. In another photo, this same slim girl was laughing as she stood on tiptoe in a boat being rowed by a grinning young man in a navy uniform. In these pictures, her mother appeared far more confident and charming than Jory currently was, or ever might be.

“That was before I met your father,” her mother had said, sighing and sliding the black-and-white photographs back into the album. “And before I joined the church.” Jory had also seen her parents’ wedding photos, though, and she knew that her mother still looked young and almost beautiful even then. It made Jory both angry and dismayed to think that her and her sisters’ introduction into the world had effected this transformation in their mother. But she knew it was so.

Her father was rounding the patio now, she could tell, running past the irrigation siphon and the clothesline, where their Keds still hung, strung up by their knotted laces. The sad, disheartening thing that seemed to have damaged or broken her mother appeared not to have touched her father at all. Jory supposed it was one of those mysterious, usually unspoken things that came with being a capital-
W
woman. The obliquely shaming filmstrips from sixth grade. The machines in public restrooms that dispensed tubelike objects for a quarter. The hot water bottles that hung like red rubber nooses from the showerhead. The blood and the pads and the tubes and the fetuses and uteruses and the embryos, all fat and sloppy and squishy and liquidy. All of it inside and unknown and fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. Her father and all other
men remained blithely outside of these objects and events and acted as if this were by choice: laughing and joking and shooting guns and shoving each other around.
Women’s stuff! Ha ha ha!

And yet, and
yet
, she also longed to be as beautiful and lovely as the teeny-footed geisha on her grandmother’s paper fan, or the coconut-shell-wearing girl on the Tahitian vanilla bottle. She wanted to have people (men and boys, in particular) be awestruck and speechless at the sight of her feminine beauty. She wanted to be powerful, but with a power she could control. She didn’t even know what that
meant
.

Her father was still running his circuit around the yard, his endless striding growing ever closer and then slowly away. She wondered, not for the first time, what she would do without the sound of his rhythmic footfalls to drag her eyelids down, how she would ever be able to fall asleep without the accompaniment of his running to carry her safely there.

This morning, Jory had seen her sister’s breast. It was quite pointed and completely purposeful looking—as if something inside of it were working very hard to get out. Plus, there were the bumps—larger than gooseflesh and kind of blistery looking all the way around her sister’s red-pink nipple. Jory stood next to Grace’s bed and said the word again in her head. Nipple. Nipple.
Nipple
. It made her feel nauseated and thrilled at the same time.

“Mom said to bring you these,” Jory said, laying a pile of folded T-shirts on Grace’s bedspread and keeping her eyes down so that Grace wouldn’t think she’d been peeping at her. “Sorry I didn’t knock.”

“That’s all right.” Grace didn’t seem that embarrassed. She pulled her thick swimsuit straps up over each shoulder and smoothed down the slightly drooping pleated skirt that she had sewn onto the bottom of it. She did a half turn in front of Jory. “Does this look all right—I mean, does it look modest enough?” She peered dubiously down at her bottom half.

Jory thought the bathing suit looked like something a spinster aunt from the 1920s would wear. Or maybe a grandmother during the Great Depression, if she suddenly had a yen to go swimming. Jory wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that suit. “It looks fine,” she said.

Grace pushed her hair behind her ears and then bent and snapped
open the locks on her suitcase. Grace wore her hair in a totally unstylish boy cut: a dark close-cropped cap of side-parted hair with longish bangs meant to partially obscure the large rose-colored birthmark on her forehead. The doctors had tried to remove the mark when Grace was three, but it hadn’t worked and their father had been worried about the level of radiation anyway. Grace was awkwardly shy about the mark and often dipped her head down when she was talking to people, although if anyone directly mentioned the birthmark, she blinked and acted as if she had no idea what they were talking about. It was confusing and somewhat contradictory, as was nearly everything connected with Grace.

Jory sat down on the bed next to the open blue suitcase. “How do you know how much stuff to take?”

“They give you a list.” Grace was pulling things out of her dresser drawers and carrying them over to the suitcase: a white leather Bible, a can of Aqua Net hair spray, pairs and pairs of day-of-the-week panties, six knee-length dresses, a Spanish dictionary, rubber thongs, some mosquito repellent, a bottle of Wind Song perfume, a
Tips for Teens in Troubled Times
daily devotional reader, three unopened packages of run-proof nylons, and a garter belt. Grace was going to Mexico on a mission. Even though she was only seventeen, their church had picked her because of her extraordinary fervor and because she wanted to go. Jory’s mother had initially had a fit—a silent fit that involved her lying in the bedroom with the door shut for two days—but she had relented in the end because their father thought it would be a wonderful learning experience for Grace and because, he said, you should never, ever stand in God’s way.

Jory thought it also had something to do with the fact that her parents were scared to death of Grace. Especially
lately
. Lately, for some unknown reason, Grace had become an even more exaggerated version of her already odd and intense and intractable self. Grace had always been tall and straight with very serious gray eyes and black winglike eyebrows and had played the piano in front of the whole church with no sheet music and no mistakes, but suddenly last spring she had stood up during the middle of Sunday evening service and testified that she was now sanctified and had rededicated her life to Christ and to His Kingdom, and then she had worked all summer long as a youth minister and turned around and put
the paycheck Pastor Ron gave her directly into the offering plate when it was passed to her during early service. Jory still remembered the look on her mother’s face when she saw Grace’s three-hundred-dollar check lying in the collection plate.
Come Ye Apart,
it said on the purple-and-gold satin banner that hung above the choir loft at the front of the church. Even so, Jory knew her parents were worried that Grace had come a little too far apart. But how could they complain? What would they say? That their oldest daughter was just too selfless and holy and Christlike? Sometimes Jory wanted to ask Grace things. To look into her cool, pond-bottom gray eyes and ask her if she, Jory, had imagined that moment in church, that tiny second when Jory could swear she had seen Grace smile just as the collection plate reached their mother’s outstretched hand.

“Aren’t you scared?” Jory asked as Grace folded a lilac-sprigged nightgown on top of everything, tucking its lacy bottom edge into a corner of the suitcase.

“Of what?” Grace closed the lid on the suitcase and fastened the latch with two quick clicks.

“I don’t know . . . being gone, I guess.” Jory drew her knees up and tucked her chin between them. “Being that far away.”

Grace gazed at her and smiled. It was the same brilliant smile she gave to all the visitors in church as she handed them each a
Welcome Friends
sticker, and to Ruby and Pearl, the retarded twins in Vacation Bible School, and to Richard Richardson, the hugely fat-bottomed choir director each time she told him, no, she was very flattered and honored, but no, she wasn’t allowed to date until she was eighteen. “You don’t think that God was scared when He came down to earth as a man, do you?” Grace asked.

Jory stared at her sister’s fathomless gray eyes.
No,
she thought.
I bet he was petrified
.