This morning, Daisy and I left home early to pick up peaches from the Farmers’ Market. I chose seven furry fruits from a couple of cardboard boxes, reaching politely over the wrinkled arms of an elderly lady who was painstakingly making her selection. The peaches, swirled with color like a smoothie, were bundled into the ice chest in the back of our car. When we reached the Salvation Army building, where our church has been doing VBS for the past week, we found that we were the first to arrive. We busied ourselves laying out nametags, and soon others came: the W's, Pastor's family, F's, and S's. Mr. Grin and Brother2 appeared somewhat late because Mr. Grin had taken Brother2 out for donuts (Mr. Grin is our church's intern, and he's staying at our house for the rest of the summer). Fric pulled me into a corner to read a “Berenstein Bears” book to her. Mary, Frac, Sis, and Pearl leaned over my shoulders to look at the cartoon pictures. When I finished, they played with waffle blocks and watched a children’s video.
Opening exercises began at ten o'clock. Pastor dressed up as "Bob the Builder" and led the kids in an enthusiastic chant. Mrs. F led the children in memorizing Psalm 127. She made them yawn and stretch before they began to sing. We passed around a cardboard box shaped like a house to take up a collection for Habitat for Humanity, and Daisy and SwanElf performed a short skit about going to the house of the Lord. Then the children broke up into their three groups. The littlest children were shepherded to the Bible story time by Katie, Beth, and Pearl; the boys were marched off to the memory verse station by Brother2 and Boromir, and SwanElf, Marigold, and I led our group of girls and led them downstairs into the basement for the first activity: crafts.
For crafts today, Christi helped the kids paint frosting onto house-shaped sugar cookies. The girls were all carefully creative, decorating their houses in good taste, but Christi told me that the boys just slathered on the icing any-which-way and stacked on as many M&M’s as they could fit. Next came memory verse time. Violin and Princess led this, teaching the children sign language to go along with John 14:2-6. After that, we escorted the led the Bible story time today. The girls were eager to interact with him and were quite attentive. Because of the rain last night, Sam kept all the children inside for games. They played mostly word games while I supervised the passing out of house cookies and cups of water. The basement reverberated with shouts and giggles from the older children's game of "vegetable soup" and from the squeals of laughter from the little ones' "duck-duck-goose". Princess gave the presentation about Amy Carmichael in the sanctuary after snacks. Violin and I remained upstairs in the sanctuary when everyone else had gone back to the basement afterwards. A draft of sweet wind blew through the two holes that someone had shattered in the stained-glass windows on the north side of the sanctuary. We talked about our siblings when they were little. We joked that we would form a spinsters club together when we were older and keep house. We could sit and look imposing: Violin could knit, and I could sew. Only I would have to get glasses in order to match Violin. I joked that we could each have a music studio and squawk at each other from across the hall on flute or violin. We had a great deal of fun imagining what our poor boarders would do when they first faced our stern, dignified gaze.
We returned downstairs cautiously after the noise had subsided. Katie told jokes during lunch. I ate a juicy peach, and the juice trickled down my fingers. Then we played our traditional game of Scattergories. Pastor, Marigold, and I were on a team. After we played, we went to the church office. Violin, Princess, and Marigold rode in my car and talked in silly accents. I think Princess’s accent jumps on her out of the trunk as soon as she touches my car.
At the church office, we hauled open the heavy door, creaked up the two flights of stairs, and entered the office. The office smells of must and mold, mainly because the roof leaks. Water spots have made brown, ripply patterns at the corners of the ceiling, like thumbprints on a page of parchment. Each afternoon after lunch, we meet at the church office to discuss the doings of the day, including VBS and the planned door-to-door evangelism session. Yesterday we shared our testimonies. Today we recited verses that Pastor had assigned us to memorize: Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, John 3:3, John 14:6, Romans 10:9-10, and Revelation 3:20. I sat and stared off into space so that Christi was quite worried about me. I was the last to recite. I twisted my hands behind my back and stared Pastor straight in the eye, except on the couple of places where my memory wasn’t too strong.
When the meeting was over, we split up into teams and for door-to-door work. SwanElf and I were together today. Pastor took Marigold, and Beth took Daisy. Pastor's team, my team, and Beth's team went together to one neighborhood, while Mr. Grin took the others to a different area. Our teams squeezed into my hot Taurus. The heat was grueling; even the wind blowing through the open windows didn’t help much. We worked in a neighborhood near Country Club. SwanElf was brimming with energy—so much that it made me think of the sign for “many” in sign language, which Violin tells the kids is like “popcorn”, or “creatures that just keep coming out of the ground”. She thoroughly enjoyed herself, while I dragged along, trying to catch some of her enthusiasm, and failing miserably.
We spoke to an unusual number of people today. My hunch is that people in this wealthier neighborhood had more time to sit around at home than people in the poorer neighborhoods where we’ve been, where the inhabitants would most likely be at work. The first man we talked to was an elderly man, perhaps in his sixties or seventies, who gave us a strong Christian testimony. It was so encouraging. He told us that Christ had helped him survive a heart attack. Pastor told us to pray for each house where we spoke to someone. So SwanElf prayed God’s blessings and gave thanks for this man. Then we had a brisk woman who was too busy for us. SwanElf attempted to talk to an old man who refused to open the door more than half-an-inch. He was quite deaf. He muttered at us in bewilderment whenever we asked him a question. The conversation went something like this (even with me helping and trying to “project”):
SwanElf/me: “Do you have any kind of spiritual belief?”
Him: “What?"
SwanElf/me: “Do you believe in God?”
Him: “Wha—? Do I have a dog?”
SwanElf/me: *helpless groans* “To you, who is Jesus?”
Him: “Who was Caesar? Well, he was… he lived a long time…”
SwanElf/me: *in desperation* “No!” *sigh* “Here’s a brochure for our church. Good-day!”
We left feeling rottenly disrespectful. Then we got a creep who seemed to have very confused beliefs about things. He told us that hell doesn’t exist, that this is what the Bible says, and that if he were to die now, he’d go to the “common grave”. We met a Catholic couple who were stereotypical, cheerfully ribbing one another the whole time. In all, we spoke to about thirteen people, two of which were two busy to carry on a long conversation. However, just about everyone else we met had some sort of works-based salvation idea. No one really had a very strong testimony. It was a little discouraging: we kept having to make variations on the same prayer: "Lord, we don't know if this person is saved. If they are, strengthen their faith. If they aren't awaken them to their own sinfulness, to Your judgment, and to salvation by faith in Christ alone."
We drove back to Pastor’s house. Marigold and SwanElf sat in the far back. Poor Beth was terribly flushed and hot. None of us were doing too well, except SwanElf, who reveled in the extreme heat the way she revels in extreme cold. At Pastor's house, most of us (except SwanElf) collapsed onto sofas and gulped gallons of cold water which Mrs. Pastor graciously provided us. Katie whispered to me that she and her sisters had a special treat in mind, as a thank-you to us for having them over to spend the night at our house tonight.
After the F's and S's left, I followed Katie to Shakey’s, where the girls treated us to ice cream. We even bought some to take home for my parents. The heat was ridiculous. I led the way home. My ice cream melted into a syrupy soup with a creamy, cold, ice-cream dumpling floating in the middle. Whenever we came to a red light, I sat and hurriedly slurped down the melted cream. Bits of Reese’s pieces snagged on my teeth, and bursts of peanut butter and chocolate filled my mouth as I crunched down on them. If I had to make a tight right turn, I’d quickly pass the little plastic cup off to Brother2, sitting beside me, until the turn was over. I led the way across campus, through the twisty, potholed little back streets, until we reached Washington and were able to zoom home. At home, I finished my ice cream, scraping off the goopy, melted outer coating to find a cold heart still waiting for me.
I escorted the girls up to their rooms. Beth and I sat in the cool schoolroom and discussed evangelism for a while until she went downstairs to see about helping with supper. I tried to put some of my things away, but Mr. Grin overtook me in my room. He had just been out running and was extremely sweaty. Beads of sweat stood out all over his tanned face, but he was grinning and eager to talk. He came into my room and looked at the books on my shelves and told me about the ones he’d read until he heard his cellphone ring. Then I escaped downstairs. My mother was playing the CD of the recital for Katie in the kitchen. I fled to the living room, and Christi began to practice the piano. I sat in a pleasant daze, dreaming away on the flowing notes. Beth sat on the sofa and hummed along with “Pie Jesu”. Then she stood by the piano, and, while Christi accompanied her, she sang “If God be for us, who can be against us?” from Handel’s “Messiah”. Her clear voice soared above the piano on vibrating wings, through the rafters, through the ceiling, out to the kites shimmering on the heat waves and the silver clouds outside….
But then Daisy interrupted them for supper. During supper, everyone discussed their favorite ethnic foods. Mr. Grin told us all about his favorite fish dishes, and my mother warned us to be careful of scallops in Chinese restaurants because sometimes they aren’t scallops at all but only round daubs of shark meat. You can tell the difference by the way the grain runs in the meat. After supper, I sat in the living room and listened to Christi, Katie, and Beth argue with Mr. Grin about whether Psalm singing in church should have “style” (dynamics, etc.) to it or not. Mr. Grin, ever the purist, held that none of that was necessary, but the girls, musicians to the core, argued in favor of it. I laughed quietly at their mannerisms, especially Christi’s—she has a very expressive face.
After supper, my mother got on the internet to check the weather because there were giant thunderheads looking into our valley, growing as the sun set. It turned out that the storm was off to the southwest of us and moving away, though. We pulled on our swimsuits and drove to the community pool. We met the B's there, and Pastor's family came, too. After I did my usual lap of the pool without touching the floor once, Christi and I went diving off the board with Mr. Grin, Will, and co. It was fun, except that water got stuck in my ears, and I nearly broke my back once when I bent over in a strange way on a dive. Violin and SwanELf came with Katie and Daisy, who had driven out to pick them up. Violin, SwanElf, Mr. Grin, Will, Christi, and I went down the waterslide. Mr. Grin and SwanElf shouted and encouraged everyone to make as big a splash as possible. “Come on! Shove yourself down all the way!” Mr. Grin yelled to me. I went down three or four times until things got a bit too rowdy for me, and then I went back to the main pool.
The S's arrived. We eventually started a game of water freezetag, which we played for the rest of the evening. We squirted and spiraled, dove and dashed, splashed and swam through the water. Violin demonstrated the butterfly stroke for me. She’s a fast swimmer. The light rippling on the floor of the pool wove iridescent patterns like the back of a retina. Once, when I came up for air out of the splash and foam of the game, I stopped, awestruck by the sunset. The thunderheads had piled into glorious tiers of grey, but their lowered, cupped hands held the sunlight like water. One long comber of orange cloud, combed purple, hung down into the diminishing pool of aquamarine sky. Purple clouds, edged magenta, floated across that comber like swirls of sand or seaweed caught in the backlash of a wave, or like islands floating on a saffron sea. The colors glowed vividly, alive, stunning, then gradually grew more and more lurid, until they disappeared, like a burst bubble. The light trickled away between the clouds, into darkness.
At nine o’clock, thirty minutes before the pool closed, my mother declared that it was time to leave. The chlorine dried on my chapped lips and stiffened my hair. Daisy and I rode with Katie to take Violin and SwanElf home. In the car, we talked about cars and roads. I sat quietly between SwanElf and Violin and listened, and shifted uncomfortably on the squidgy pad of my wet towel. We dropped them off. I settled into my damp towel for the drive back into town, my bare shoulders pocked with goosebumps. We had joked earlier in the day that we were going to watch “The Village”, but Katie told me that she was serious about it, so I gave her directions to Blockbuster. She was in a jovial mood, like SwanElf. She drove fast, as though her exuberance had gotten into the car.
When we got to the store, I had no shirt with me, but Daisy and Katie had shirts and shorts, so they went into Blockbuster while I waited in the car. I watched them walk across the dark parking lot towards the glass box of the lit store. Daisy’s hair swished behind her like a tangled veil. Katie hastily ran a stiff brush through her short, blond hair. I followed them until they disappeared among the shelves of DVD’s. I sat and made poetry in my head. Neon signs glowed like remnants of the sunset in the darkness. Cars whizzed past. The road glistened under the headlights like the rainbowed underside of a CD. The city seemed to be in as buoyant a mood as SwanElf. A young couple left Blockbuster, laughing together; another couple, with a toddler strapped into a set of yellow pajamas, entered the store. A couple of girls, chatting on cellphones, climbed into jaunty little sports cars and zoomed away. And I sat silent in the back seat, not shivering, but feeling very outside myself, seeing the world differently, lining out the iambic rhythm in my head, letting its gentle stresses massage my tired mind. The girls returned with the DVD. We drove home.
The house looked abandoned from the outside, but when we stepped onto the back porch, a cordial light surrounded us from the lamps in the living room where all the adults were sitting up, talking. Katie, Daisy, and I showered quickly. My father went to bed, but the rest of us went upstairs to watch “The Village” on the computer. Beth and Daisy moved the sofa so that it faced the computer. Christi ensconced herself with pillows on the floor. Beth, Daisy, Katie, and I crowded onto the sofa. My mother watched with us for a while, and Mr. Grin joined us after she left. The movie was every bit as lovely as I remembered it. Daisy buried her head under Katie’s pillow at every scary part. During the scene on the porch between Ivy and Lucius, the DVD stalled and the computer refused to respond to my frantic promptings. I eventually persuaded it to work by taking the DVD out and putting it back in again. Occasionally, I would make snide remarks aside to Katie, and we’d giggle together. “Look, as Mrs. F said, they’re throwing dead meat at those-we-don’t-speak-of, so those-we-don’t-speak-of throw dead meat right back at them,” I whispered in her ear, and she chortled with laughter. The only trouble was that in the stabbing scene, Mr. Grin said, “Oh, yeah! That was great! Look at that! Wow!” and made similar comments at the scary parts, though sometimes he tempered it with, “That wasn’t so bad! Come on!” I felt like hurling my pillow at him, but I refrained.
After, Christi went straight to bed. The rest of us stayed up for a little bit talking about the themes of depravity, sacrifice, and fear. It was twelve-thirty a.m. by the time we were all in bed. I had a horrible time getting to sleep: not only have I not been sleeping well lately, but, as always, the movie had “wired” me. I was also a bit jumpier than usual. My mind scurried, as busy as a hamster in an exercise ball, through the day, and the movie, over and over. I lay there and tried to smile and fall asleep, but it didn’t work too well…
