“I’m already surprised,” I said. “Come in. Come in. It’s cold out there.”
Elaine reached back to take the hand of four-year-old Mia, who’d been hiding behind her legs. “Mia’s been excited to see Rufus,” Elaine said, and the little girl peeped up from under heavy, dark bangs.
As they hung up their coats, I said to Mia, “I’m not sure where Rufus is, but I bet he’ll come if you call.”
She ducked behind her mother’s legs again.
Peter scooped her up, swung her high in the air, making her giggle before setting her on his hip. “How ’bout you and I track that mutt down,” he said. “He loves you best, so you better do the calling.”
Held by her father like that, Mia sprang open, unfolded like an origami bird, throwing her head back, laughing and shouting, “Rufus-Bufus! Come here, silly! Come here Rufus-Bufus, you silly puppy!” Peter joined in, shouting in unison with her, “You silly puppy!” as if it were a chorus they’d written together.
Rufus came running from Evangeline’s room. He jumped on Peter, nudging his head against Mia’s legs. She squealed in happiness and slid down, hurling herself on Rufus, who rolled onto his back so she could pet his pink tummy. Peter was right, Rufus always had liked shy little Mia best.
As the other girls piled on, Evangeline, who’d come out of her room, plunked on the floor with them. When she saw Zoe batting the dog like he was an annoying toy, she touched Zoe’s arm and said in a confidential whisper, “Want to know what Rufus really loves?”
Zoe nodded vigorously.
“It’s kind of tricky, but I’m thinking maybe you can do it. See what I’m doing?” Evangeline gently stroked his ears with two fingertips. And with that, Zoe was all softness and caution, using the full force of her concentration to control her wild, urgent hands.
Then Hannah tugged at Evangeline’s arm, trying to wrest her away from Zoe. “We have a present for you. Come on.”
In the kitchen, Hannah snatched up the bag and thrust it toward me as she and Zoe shouted, “Look inside! Look inside!”
“How about we let Evangeline do the honors,” I said, suggesting we gather at the kitchen table.
Zoe yelled, “Yes! Evange do it!” and all three attempted to climb onto Peter’s lap to get a good view.
“Hey!” Elaine said. “Do I have cooties or something?”
“No, Mommy,” Mia said, sliding onto her mother and snuggling in. Zoe, having won the battle for her father, stood mightily on his thighs, her knees bouncing, her hands fisted through his hair as if she were water-skiing on a rough bay and he was her towline. Then she began working his scalp, making locks stick up at odd angles as she sang, “Messy Daddy, Messy Daddy.”
When Zoe finally settled, Evangeline carefully loosened the bow and flourished out each item, announcing with impressed joy the sparkling cider, the noisemakers, the microwave popcorn. She saved a particular awe for homemade cookies with colorful candies forming our initials: some with an I and others with an E.
Peter tapped Mia’s shoulder. “Tell Isaac and Evangeline whose idea the decorations were.”
She burrowed into her mother’s chest, murmuring, “My idea.”
“Maybe a little louder? So they can hear.”
She turned her face just enough to free her mouth. “My idea,” she said, sounding scared but proud too, checking her father’s face for approval. Peter beamed at her, and she beamed back, then twisted around so she was facing the group.
Evangeline asked if they could each take an early cookie and “go play” in her room.
Elaine laughed. “As long as you care nothing for your belongings!”
Hannah eyed her little sisters and said solemnly, “I’ll make sure they don’t break anything.”
“Ah, well,” Peter said with equal gravity, “we couldn’t ask for better assurance than that.”
When they had left, Peter snorted. “Hannah is the worst of them!”
Over the next hour, we heard the occasional squeal of four girls playing in a room down the hall, and the house felt as if the furnace had finally kicked on. I can’t remember what we talked about, likely holiday events and summer plans, but I was distracted. Peter was watching his wife with an expression I couldn’t quite unravel. A type of longing, almost reverence, as if she were a tenuous new love, not the woman he tussled with over bills and child care and household chores. You’d think he was only now discovering the depth of her mysteries and wonders.
When they left that afternoon, the little girls wore lipstick and blush and silver ribbons in braided hair, and for the first time in a long time I felt the affectionate familiarity with Peter I’d been missing.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, I sat in my office clearing old emails and thinking of Peter, how he’d held Elaine in his sight with such tender curiosity. I wondered whether, after marrying Katherine, I’d ever let my eyes rest on her that way.
Probably not. By the time we’d said our vows, I believed I saw my wife with near-perfect clarity. I believed it was that sight that would keep our marriage safe. In truth, I had made myself blind to her, turned her static, destroyed any possibility of discovering in her something new. I was always calling her “my wife.” And to a woman like Katherine, wouldn’t that very term be a type of violence? The shearing back of a full and wild human into a form that can be owned and contained, safe and neat and completely known. “My wife.” I was always saying that. No wonder she fled the confines of me.
I was about to shut down the computer when Evangeline poked her head in to say she was going to bed.
“That was nice today, wasn’t it?” I said.
“What?”
“Peter and Elaine and the girls stopping by.”
Evangeline shrugged.
“You didn’t like having them here?”
“The little girls were fun.”
“And Peter and Elaine?”
“Elaine seems nice.”
“But not Peter?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I swiveled to face her. “No, really, I’d like to know.”
“It’s just that . . .” She let out an exasperated breath. “I just don’t think he’s who you think he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole aren’t-I-an-amazing-family-man-and-school-leader shtick he’s got going on. It’s kind of bullshit.”
“I don’t see how you’re in a position to—”
Her hand shot up. “I told you. I don’t want to talk about this. I said I’m going to bed, and that’s what I’m doing.”
After she left, I stared blankly at the computer. It must have been painful for Evangeline to see such a close-knit family, to witness their easy touches and laughter, to know that each child was cherished. I understood why she’d rather deny the reality of such a family than accept the unfairness of her own life.
As for Peter, the school’s rumor mill likely contributed to her false impression. A tale had spread in the fall of a supposed affair between Peter and a pretty new teacher. I was back east when the rumor hit its brief peak, but I would never have believed it in any case. Students imagine dalliances between faculty and staff on the flimsiest of evidence. Peter was a powerful man. It did not surprise me in the least that, on a few occasions, he had become the object of sexual fantasy.
* * *
—
WHEN SCHOOL RESUMED, life took on a soothing routine. I was so loath to risk it I considered canceling the clearness committee. But George had gone to some lengths to put it together, and schedules had almost certainly been changed on my behalf.
On the second Tuesday of January, I arrived at the meetinghouse at six thirty in the evening. George had just finished setting up the conference room. He’d arranged three chairs to form a soft curve facing a fourth chair that would be
mine. An end table with a lamp sat beside the lone chair. Though likely aiming for coziness, the way George powered the lamp—with an orange extension cord stretched across yards of bare linoleum—created an atmosphere of inquisition rather than of soulfulness.
I approved of George’s other choices though. He’d turned off the overhead fluorescents and provided two more lamps that lit a narrow credenza along a wall. He’d collapsed the large center table and leaned it at the back so there’d be no barrier between us. The effect, while far from intimate, was overall less harsh than it would have been without his efforts.
George and I had agreed the committee would be small. I didn’t know whom he had selected. He hadn’t volunteered the information, and I had decided to make it a part of my spiritual practice to accept whoever presented.
Ralph Prouser was the first to arrive. I glared at George—surely he understood the long-standing tension between us—but his back was turned in greeting Ralph, who looked past him to acknowledge me with a stern nod. A short, wiry man with an unkempt graying beard, Ralph was in the overalls and canvas jacket he wore at his thrift store. In all the years I’d known him, he’d never once broken the silence in meeting and wasn’t one to waste words outside it either.
One of the few times he had spoken to me was at a holiday gathering. He’d downed several glasses of wine, then sidled up as I was about to dig into the onion dip. “Perhaps you could tell me, Isaac, how you and the Lord came to be so close. I’ve never known anyone else who’s chosen with such regularity to speak for the Divine.”
What galled me was this: Ralph didn’t believe, as I did, in the need for a physical sign from God before breaking the silence. My Pennsylvania meeting insisted on a quickening before speaking—a tremor or sweat or a wildly beating heart, some clear manifestation that the One wished to convey a message. Many of these West Coast Quakers didn’t even recognize the term “quickening.” They broke the silence on the barest of thresholds, suggesting only that a Friend consider waiting for an “inner nudge.”
Once I proposed that we hold ourselves to a higher standard, pointing out that a “nudge” was far more likely to arise from one’s ego than from anything of the Divine. Ralph snorted when I said this. Truly, it was nearly a guffaw. Yet he stood before me at that holiday table, mocking me, implying that I was the one who had violated Quaker standards.
I should have specifically requested that Ralph not be on my committee. I was still trying to catch George’s eye when Abigail Groff came through the door. Though her long gray hair was limp and her skin sallow, you could see the beauty she’d once been. That was before her husband died of pancreatic cancer at fifty-four and the decades of work on their horse-training barn were lost to bankruptcy, before the stress stripped the meat off her bones, left her thin and angular in her flannel shirt and muck boots. Yet when she turned my way, a strength landed on me, an intelligence deeper and more beautiful than any young woman could ever muster.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for doing this.” I remembered the others and nodded at them as well. “It’s no small gift you’re giving me.”
Abigail presented me with a small candle. “It’s calming.”
I placed it on the end table, and she lit it, the scent of wax and lavender wafting, a curl of smoke rising to the ceiling.
We took our seats. George sat directly across from me, flanked by Abigail and Ralph. George cleared his throat but didn’t stand, didn’t raise himself above the rest of us. “I trust we all understand our purpose here,” he said. “I’m going to briefly review the process. It’s been a while for some of us, and even in the best of circumstances it can be challenging.”
He read from a piece of paper: “A clearness committee is premised on the belief that each of us holds an inner teacher, a voice of truth that guides us. We are not here to fix Isaac or give advice or save him. We are here to help him find inside himself the answers and strength he needs.”
There was more, but I couldn’t help glancing at Abigail, who kept her gaze lowered in concentration, the delicate purple around her eyes and the hollow curve of her cheeks softly lit in the room’s glow. Ralph too kept glancing her way. Something like affection rose in his face, and I wondered what right he had to such feelings for her. Her husband had been dead less than a year, and Ralph was married, though his wife had moved out a few years back.
“Ask only open questions aimed at helping Isaac go deeper,” George was saying, “rather than try to guide him to your preferred outcome or satisfy your curiosity. Not ‘Have you thought about . . .’ or even ‘Does that make you feel angry?’ Follow leads he presents: ‘What did you mean when you said “frustrated”?’ or ‘Does this remind you of another time in your life?’”
As he spoke, he stared into the middle distance, at times closing his eyes, so intent on the process that he failed to notice Ralph’s clear distraction with Abigail.
“The only answers that matter are those that arise from Isaac’s own inner truth. We are here to hold Isaac in the light, hold him in love, help open him to his own wisdom.”
Ralph, perhaps hearing a winding-up tone in George’s words, flicked his eyes toward me. When he saw my scrutiny, he dropped his head as if embarrassed.
“Isaac, in the last fifteen minutes you can decide whether you’d like us to mirror back what we saw and heard, or the process can stay open to questions or silence.”
Turning to Abigail and Ralph, George said, “Remember, if those of us on the outside inject our views, no matter how subtly, we will make it harder, not easier, for Isaac to hear the small quiet voice of his soul.” He then called us to silence.
As the focus person, it was my place to break the silence when ready. By tradition, that would mean presenting the issue I wished to address. But it took me a good ten minutes to settle my heart about Ralph. I kept rehashing his holiday ambush, and I was disturbed by his apparent feelings for Abigail.
Finally, I noticed Ralph sitting quietly, his eyes lowered in peaceful meditation, and a gratefulness struck me. Where else in this world of materialism and narcissism and ideological fractiousness would a grown man speak of the “small quiet voice of the soul”? Where else could I find peers who trusted me to discover my own wisdom over their own? How lucky I was to be surrounded by those who believed that loving presence and listening hearts saved far more souls than the millions of words written by man in God’s name.
They would sit in silence for the next two hours if that was what I chose. And while being held in the light is a true gift, I wanted to speak, to do the work. But I couldn’t decide where to begin. When I finally opened my mouth to speak, the eyes of three Friends lifted as one.
“I don’t know how to start.”
We sat with that a few minutes, and then Abigail said, “Is there anything your mind keeps replaying and you don’t know why? Over and over, there it is?”
Many things looped in my mind, most for obvious reasons such as my last morning with Daniel or Evangeline’s “I hated your son.” But there was something else, from a few years back. And while at one level the reason was clear—it involved a conflict between Daniel and Jonah—my mind was searching its details for something more.
I said yes, a certain event did keep repeating in my mind, but I wasn’t sure there was anything to it. We sat in silence as I waited for Divine guidance. Finding none, I began on my own.
“A couple years back, Katherine and I and the two boys borrowed George’s boat for an overnight sail. Remember that, George?”
He smiled but kept his gaze down.
“It was September, one of those late-summer days, seventies and sunny. Perfect. We got into Desolate Bay late afternoon. The boys had been sniping at each other. Nothing big, just the usual bickering. I thought we’d use up some of that energy kayaking.”
I took a sip of water, reflec
ting. “About a half hour in, Daniel headed out the entrance into open water. It was calm, and all of us were strong kayakers, so I didn’t see a problem. When we got out there, the shoreline . . . it was strange. Hard to describe, really. All these smooth, low-slung boulders, one on top of another. I swung in closer, and those rocks, they started barking. Then they began to move, slide apart.”
The eyes of the three Friends were on me. “Sea lions,” I said. “Hundreds and hundreds of them. Now, George knows I’ve spent my share of time out in those islands, but I’d never seen so many in one place. I didn’t recognize them like that.
“Three of them slipped into the water and disappeared. The rest were wailing and barking at us, incredibly reactive. They must have had pups.
“Katherine and I knew enough to back away, but Jonah and Daniel paddled closer. I yelled to leave them alone, but I doubt they heard. A scuffle broke out. Jonah bumped Daniel, probably on purpose. And Daniel shoved Jonah’s kayak hard with his paddle. Almost flipped it.
“Then those sea lions popped up. Couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the boys.”
My heart was racing, and I stopped, let it slow. The three Friends were still watching me, though when my eyes fell on Abigail, she dropped her gaze.
“You know how flat and black their eyes can be?” I said. “Like empty holes. They were like that. And they wanted us gone. I yelled at the boys. The boys did swing around, but they kept taunting each other. The wind had picked up, and I didn’t hear what they said. I just had this sense of bickering.
“Anyway, now these sea lions are following us, like they’re escorting us out of their territory, and I hear a splash behind me. I’m thinking it’s one of them, but when I check, it’s Daniel. The idiot is out of his kayak, swimming toward them. Then Jonah dives in. And those sea lions, they aren’t giving up any ground.
“So now there are the boys and the sea lions and the kayaks drifting. I yell, and Daniel stops, realizing his stupidity, I guess. Jonah too. One of the animals slips under, and the next thing I know, Daniel is screaming, his arm in the air, blood pouring from it.
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