The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (5 page)

It was that same year that his mother became ill, very ill. The doctors in town said tuberculosis, then rheumatic fever. His mother grew so thin he could see her ribs beneath her dress. She lay in bed, her breath only the smallest movement of the bedcovers. He did his chores and then tried to learn how to cook so his father would have something to eat when he came in from the cornfields. On Palm Sunday, his mother asked his father to bring the elders to their house after church. He could still remember the sight of the eight men in black suits and dusty farmers’ hats walking single file up their dirt driveway. He peeked in from the doorway as the men took their places around his mother’s bedside and prayed, the mingled rise and fall of their voices sounding like the hum of his father’s bee boxes in springtime. As they prayed, one of the men brought a small brown bottle of oil out of his pocket and placed several drops of it on his mother’s forehead, rubbing it in with his callused thumb. They moved closer to his mother then, leaning across the bed to each place their two hands on some part of her body. As he watched, he felt a sudden, hot jolt run through his throat and down his legs—he could remember the feeling still—as if he’d been plugged into a socket, as if it were his body they were touching instead of hers. Later that day, his mother sent him out to the barn to find his father, who had been pretending to trim some of the horses’ hooves while the elders were there. When they came inside, she was sitting up in bed, her hair combed and braided, and she told his father that she wanted some peach cobbler. Made with the sweet white Elbertas from the back end of the orchard. She smiled. He and his father spent the rest of the evening picking peaches in the dark.

“I knew that my mother had been healed, and that it was a miracle,” he was saying now over the congregation. He cleared his throat and readjusted his reading glasses, pushing them farther up onto the bridge of his nose.

“I am a scientist now myself,” he said, “and perhaps ironically, one of the very things that continues to convince me of the existence of God
is
the so-called ‘inexplicable.’ Consider the essential mystery of the birth of the cosmos. The recipe that was required for its creation is mind-boggling in both its complexity and precision.” Jory’s father spread out his hands as if to indicate the immense difficulty of the explanation he was about to give. “For example, the strength of the attractive nuclear forces in our universe is so peculiarly precise that, were it even slightly different, hydrogen would be a rare element, stars like the sun could not exist, and the emergence of life would have been impossible. Had the nuclear forces been weaker, on the other hand, hydrogen would not burn and there would be no heavy elements, and again, we would not have a universe hospitable to creatures like us. The universe, moreover, is constructed on such a scale that stars in a typical galaxy are twenty million million miles apart; were the distances between stars just two million million miles, life could not have survived on our planet.”

Jory cringed slightly at the mention of all these million-millions. It reminded her of math class and she was worried that other people were being reminded too. Sermons should have only very simple equations with small numbers in them. People couldn’t remember the huge sums. Grace had told her this.

“Consider too the careful positioning of our very own earth,” her father was saying, oblivious to Jory’s or anyone else’s mathematical dismay. “In order for any planet to produce life—complex life, such as ours did—it has to lie within what we astronomers euphemistically call the ‘Goldilocks Zone’: a distance from its star that is not too hot, not too cold, but just right. It is only in this zone that a planet would be close enough to the star to have liquid water, yet not so close that its oceans would boil away, and not so far that its oceans would freeze.

“But how exactly did all this careful exactness and minute precision
come about? you may ask. How did this perfect recipe for creation occur? Was the universe with its life-giving laws and perfectly spaced galaxies a marvelous fluke, a random accident, a precipitous bit of happenstance?” Jory’s father leaned forward. “I am convinced that the enormous complexity of the cosmos together with the marvelous harmony of reality bear witness to the plausibility of a creator. Can I prove this theory? No. Can I prove the opposite? No. Nor can any other scientist. For all of science’s brave claims to the contrary, the birth of the universe still remains a mystery—an unexplainable miracle. Much like the healing of a physical body. Or the splendor of the night sky above a Kansas farm. Or an old man and a young boy picking peaches in the dark.”

Jory’s father stood holding the wooden sides of the lectern. “Many Christians seem to fear that the end result of scientific inquiry is an inevitable loss of faith. I find this notion somewhat confusing since my lifelong study has only reaffirmed my belief that a mighty hand is at work in the wonders of the world. We must remember”—Jory’s father’s voice seemed to be shaking its finger slightly—“the ability to question and search for answers is a God-given one. We were made by Him to think and to wonder and, yes, sometimes even to doubt. But the natural world is always there as a reminder of the glory and majesty and the mystery of its Maker. Even Job on his ash heap gazed around him and wondered where the light came from and how the hail was formed. We should do no less. May God bless you,” her father said. “And keep you.” He turned from the pulpit and walked back to the empty chair behind him.

“Your dad’s so smart,” said Rhonda. She twirled a lank piece of black hair between her fingers. “Does he like peaches or what?”

Brother Elmore stood at the podium, smiling. “Thank you so much, Brother Quanbeck, for those truly inspiring words of wisdom.” He held up the night’s bulletin. “Now don’t forget,” he said. “After the service there will be a potluck in Franklin Hall to celebrate the Jewels’ return from Papua, New Guinea. They are only here on a short sabbatical, so I know you’ll all want to come and greet them—if not with a holy kiss, then at least a friendly handshake.”

Jory and Rhonda were waiting for Brent Sandoval to request “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” for Rhonda. They listened to Rhonda’s transistor radio clear till ten o’clock, but they couldn’t really tell because there were lots of L.’s, and even two L.R.’s, but none of them were from B.S. “I don’t like him anyway.” Rhonda was bent over in her nightgown, polishing her toenails. “He’s like half Indian or something.”

“Why doesn’t he go with Stormy Aguilar, then?”

“Maybe they’re from warring tribes or something.” Rhonda ran her tongue over her toothless spot and they screamed with laughter and ran out into the living room even though they had their shortie pajamas on.

“Girls. Really.” Rhonda’s mother glanced up mildly from the white nurse’s uniform she was hemming. “How’s your sister doing, Jory? Isn’t she in Puerto Rico now?”

“She’s in Mexico.” Jory sat down breathlessly in one of the Russells’ orange plastic chairs. “She’ll be back in a few weeks.”

“That’s right. Well, I hope she isn’t drinking the water.” Mrs. Russell tossed the white dress onto the seat of a rocking chair. “Oh, my,” she said, stretching her freckled arms above her head and bending from side to side until her back made a sudden popping sound. “You know, you wouldn’t catch any of my four heading off on a mission. Not unless it was to Bermuda and there were nothing but good-looking boys there.”

“Oh,
Ma
.” Rhonda gave her mother a look of disgust and then fell backward onto the couch.

Jory gazed around her. This was where she wanted to live. If only the Russells would agree, she could call her parents and tell them that this was where she would be staying from now on. She could sleep on their ratty orange couch and eat their tater tots and wear all of Rhonda’s clothes. The air here was filled with some kind of greasy warmness—like fried hamburger left overnight in a pan. The whole house was messy and sloppy and unfolded. You could eat cereal out of the box. There
was
cereal! And no one seemed to care one whit about particle physics or whether sanctification was a secondary act of grace or if lentils were the best-known source of protein and vitamin B.

Sometime later that night, Jory tried to tell Rhonda about the detective’s magazines, about how the naked women had practically emerged
and sprung forth from the pictures, but Rhonda just peered at her sideways and said, “You are seriously a homo,” and went back to playing the bottom hand of “Heart and Soul” on their rickety old piano.

Jory bumped Grace’s ten-speed up into a slot in the bike rack in front of Super Thrift. She unhooked her beaded change purse from around the handlebars and counted the folded bills that were packed tightly inside. She zipped it up again and slipped the coin purse into the back pocket of her cutoffs. The automatic door whooshed open and she walked into the Listerine coolness of the store, heading straight for aisle C. She stopped in front of the display case. It was still there. The Budding Beauty by Maidenform in a 30AA. Lightly padded for extra shaping with crisscross straps for gentle support and elastic stretch cups to allow for change in the still-growing teen. The girl on the front of the box smiled tanly in her half slip and bra.

Jory held the box next to her stomach and floated toward the makeup and jewelry section. If the lipstick was still $3.99, she would definitely have enough left over for a bottle of Love’s Fresh Lemon Cologne. Anyway, Rhonda Russell wore Love’s Baby Soft Cologne, so it wouldn’t be like copying. What if she got some of that Sun In stuff you sprayed on your hair to make it blonder? Her mother would
kill
her—she said bleached hair was cheap with a capital
C
, for tramps with a capital
T
.

Jory picked up a pair of silver hoop earrings with tiny stars suspended from the center. She held them next to one ear and then the other, moving the display mirror so she could see. Her mother had said no pierced ears ever—it was in the church manual. Jory sighed and put the earrings back on the display counter and then turned and headed for the lipstick case. She would have to decide between Icicle Frost and Petal Pale. What a choice. She pulled one tube out of the display case and then the other. The goldy caps slid off with the most satisfying little suctioned pops. Twisting the waxy sticks up, she rubbed a tiny bit of each of the pointed tips onto her wrist. They both appeared sufficiently silvery—maybe Icicle Frost was a little bit more glossy, though. She felt a thrill run through her. At home she would put on her bra and a little bit of the lipstick and her white T-shirt with the lace inset and before
her mother could say anything she would ride Grace’s bike over to Kurtz Park to see if Rhonda was there. Her head seemed to open like a window, and she walked as fast as she could toward the front of the store. A very small man with a blue short-sleeved shirt and large armpit stains suddenly stood in front of her. He took a step closer and squeezed her elbow. Hard.

“Come on,” he said. Jory could think of nothing except the smell of Sen-Sen on his breath. The little man walked her and her bra box quickly down the garden supply aisle and toward the back of the store. Jory could feel a kind of fistlike burning in her chest. “What’s wrong? I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. He walked her through a set of swinging doors and then suddenly they were inside a little room marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“Have a seat,” he said and sat down himself at a desk and began writing something on a pink notepad. Jory sat on a metal chair across from another man, this one wearing a tie.

“Give me that,” the tie man said. Jory glanced down in surprise at the box and handed it to him. He immediately wrenched open the top of the box and pulled out the folded bra. He rooted around in its creases for a minute, shook it once, and then dumped it onto the desk, where it lay, its small white cups pointing stiffly toward the ceiling. He grabbed the golden lipstick tube from her and plunked it down next to the bra.

The man with the tie pointed a pen at her. “Stand up and empty your pockets.”

Jory stood and started fishing around in the front of her shorts as though expecting to find something. “But I don’t have anything.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets. “Wait. I’ve got my change purse.” She held it out almost triumphantly.