Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  The school system was trying to promote it as the Academy, harking back to the time when Waco, because of all its early educational institutions, had been known as the Athens of Texas. But the kids had already coined another name for the would-be Academicians: nesters. An old term around here for those small homesteaders whose farms were tucked within the spread of larger landholders. Besides, Athens to most of the kids was just the name of an east Texas town. They were concentrating now on the glory that was Kyoto and the grandeur that was Jakarta.

  But right here in the mild breezy tail end of Wind Day, the foursome was debating whether to go run or stop by the school and shoot baskets.

  While they talked, bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet, Baby was slowly drumming on Sugar’s back with her fists, doing a little jivey dance, as if making music.

  Sugar whirled and glowered at her sister. “I wish you would stop acting like a dark continent, dickhead—” The tall athlete looked down at me and made a polite apology. “Pardon, Mrs. Tait, that’s peer group parlance for ‘seventh-grader.’ ”

  I laughed with them. How transparent they all were in their feuds. Each needing constant attention, approval, from her one true peer, her sister. Maybe, I thought, that was who we always cared the most about, the ones we grew up with.

  Maybe that was the cement between Drew and me: we went all the way back to the good old dumb old days.

  I SAT ON the side of the bed, in a white cotton gown and an old white terry-cloth robe. My thinking was that I didn’t want to be wearing only a nightgown when Eben came in, as if everything was the same; on the other hand, if we had bitter words, I didn’t want to have to excuse myself to go get undressed. I was nervous as a cat. There were no guidelines for telling someone you shared a double bed with that you were no longer going to be the wife you were right that minute being.

  It was curious, unlikely really, my having married Eben. He’d come from a Calvinist background that stretched back to Calvin himself, at least in thinking. Grandfathers far before him, and then his illustrious old missionary father, fifty when Eben was born, grappling with the heart of the church doctrine, the kernel of its paradox: can there be free will if our actions are predetermined?

  Eben had been the old son of an old father who’d spent his life disavowing the legacy of the Victorian world: its hysterical warnings against morbid desires, spermatorrhea, novel reading, lascivious thoughts. Eben’s mother had died in childbirth with him, a fact that had been presented to him as foreordained. Surely, I’d often thought, this death was the seed of Eben’s faith in a Calvinist God, a God to whom all things are known, all outcomes decided. Perhaps, I also suspected, it was the origin of Eben’s inability to handle surprises, his insistence on knowing everything in advance of its occurring.

  He’d gone into the church expecting to battle crises of faith; instead, he’d faced its banalization. When we moved to Waco to Grace Presbyterian, Eben had found himself, rather unwillingly, an authority in ecumenical circles on mixed marriages, concerning which he complained bitterly that the battle was never over the liturgy or the ceremony—matters for which the couple’s forebears had gone to their deaths—but only over the wedding reception. The Baptists refusing to allow hug dancing or alcoholic beverages; the Presbyterians seeing strength in moderation. The bride crying: It won’t kill him to have a dry reception. The groom sulking: She won’t go to hell in a handbasket for dancing with her daddy in her wedding dress.

  In his private pastoral counseling, he’d handled non-doctrinal matters of an even more disheartening sort. For instance, there were the three regulars who’d appeared in the past year. First was Boyd, a skinny high school math teacher, who’d come in because, he said, he was so lonely he’d bought a ring to marry himself, and oughtn’t he to have some sort of ceremony before he consummated the relationship? Then there was Blanche, an elderly woman who’d lost first her husband and then most of her hair. (Eben had got so excited, thinking how marvelous, that the body would reenact the response of the grief-stricken widow tearing out her hair!) She’d come, she explained, because she’d had a stress reaction to her husband’s death, and the doctor was giving her antidepressants and the hairdresser, protein packs, but she wanted to know if Eben thought it would look all right if she took to wearing hats to church again, the way they used to? Then, more recently, he’d been having weekly sessions with Jae-Moon, a Korean woman whose family had been converted by missionaries back home, who knew of his father and therefore felt she had the right to point out to Eben where in each of his recent sermons he’d been sexist, racist and classist.

  I hadn’t been a religious person when Eben and I met. We’d been introduced by the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, a woman whose son and daughter I’d successfully tutored for the SAT, back when I made my living that way. She’d been on the lookout for someone nice for me, and he’d shown up, the assistant pastor at her church. What he and I had in common from the start was that we were both textualists of a sort. I spent my time wrestling with the exact meanings of words, just as he wrestled with the more ambiguous texts of the Testaments, Old and New. He’d seemed, at the start of our marriage anyway, to find it pleasing, gratifying, that I never tired of talking over with him the smallest passage, listening as he squeezed the last drop of meaning or promise or prophecy from it.

  For instance, tonight, I knew, he was working on a sermon for tomorrow titled “The Garden in the Desert; the Desert in the Garden.” He’d said, when he began it earlier in the week, that he was using the Gospel of Matthew. It being three weeks before Easter, I knew then that he would be doing Gethsemane and Peter’s denial. That he would read, for the lesson, Jesus saying, “This night before the cock crows thou shalt deny me thrice,” and Peter protesting, “Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee.” And I could hear already in my mind Eben’s reasoned exploration of the question: If it was prophesied, could Peter have done otherwise? And, Did the fact that he could not have, lessen his responsibility for what he did?

  In truth, it was my knowledge of the Scriptures that allowed me to keep my deepest secret from Eben: the real source of his daughters’ names (St. Denis, Graham). Allowed me to present them with these promises for their future. I’d had no trouble with calling the first baby Ruth, Ruth’s story in the Bible being one many times retold from pulpits, a lesson in unselfish love; her promise to her husband’s mother, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,” many times quoted. But I’d had to cite chapter and verse to get his agreement on calling the second child Martha. I used a parable in Luke in which one sister, Mary, sits at Jesus’s feet while the other, Martha, complains that she has to do all the serving while Mary gets all the attention. To which Jesus responds with the lesson of grace and works that is at the heart of church doctrine. When I pointed out to Eben that had Martha not pushed the confrontation, the lesson would have been lost, he accepted my point, and agreed to that name for our second child.

  I’d not been entirely happy, when we married, to quit my SAT tutoring; it had been satisfying, every student a success, every parent gratified. And the money was grand. But in those days, fifteen years ago, churches still expected a preacher-plus-wife for their salary. Now, at least, when so many divinity students were marrying each other, that was changing. It wasn’t that congregations were any more eager to have a spouse working out in the community—risking the possible leakage of church confidences—but rather that they’d become willing to pay the price of joint preachers, husband and wife, two for the price of two. In fact, a couple of Waco’s big downtown churches, First Methodist and First Presbyterian, now had joint married pastors, a parity situation satisfactory to everyone.

  No doubt I was thinking all that, here on the side of the bed, in some effort to reassure myself that to Eben my defection might seem only one more example of the general dispiriting changes within the church. The preacher’s wife who packed and left.

  I’D BEEN QUITE awed to be asked out by Eben Tai
t. Awe: wonder mixed with fear, and I guess that’s what I’d been. He wasn’t my image of what a preacher would be like. I’d imagined that we’d, oh, see cultural things, or sit and drink a lot of hot tea and talk about religion—my lack of it, his obvious excess of it. That he’d ask at the door, the way they did in old books, if he could kiss me good night. Not at all the way it turned out.

  We had our first evening together with the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft and her sister-in-law, then the next night we went out alone to a café, connected to a bakery, in an old part of Austin, and had falling-off-the-bone chicken and homemade bread. Eben asked me quite a lot of questions about myself, seeming to know all the answers in advance, which had seemed clairvoyant and flattering. Then he asked if I’d come back to his apartment for the evening, with an option to spend the night if we both agreed matters were headed in that direction. Was I—he hesitated—prepared to do that? Me, he was asking, the daughter of Celia Guest of Planned Parenthood. All I said was yes, yes I was, and that all right, yes, I’d like to do that.

  I have no memory of the rest of the meal. Whether we had dessert or whether he’d ordered wine or even whether we split the bill as we always did later. I was in sort of a daze at his moving so fast. He was older by what seemed to me then at least a generation (being thirty-two to my twenty-four) and certain of everything. That was my first impression, that this man, dark, tall, serious, attentive already, had the confidence to come right out and ask me to stay the night with the church looking over his shoulder. Quite different, his style, from the awkward, taking-what-was-available men I’d been with. (Not that many, but some, anyone with long legs who liked to move, anyone who reminded me of Andy.)

  Eben drove my car to his apartment—a small place over a garage in a nice fading neighborhood near the church, not far from downtown—so that he wouldn’t have to give directions, he said. In fact, he drove my car whenever we were both in it until he got the church in Waco and a (Korean) car of his own. That should have been a warning: that he could never be a passenger. But I was not looking for signs at that time.

  His apartment had floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, mostly theology, and a double bed, with an iron frame, that was covered with texts and typed papers, and so high off the floor it somehow gave the impression of a work space. There were two chairs by the upstairs window, easy chairs that belonged to the landlady, and we sat there and had, after all, our tea. Many cups of tea, while he told me about his father, about the tradition of missionaries in his family, about the strong connection with Korea, about the decline of faith in the church.

  I bit the bullet and said, “I’m not really what you’d call a believer, Eben. I guess I’m more of a—heathen.” I knew, although I didn’t know if he did, what the word actually meant: someone on the heath, an outsider.

  “Grace,” he’d said, quick as a wink, as if he’d prepared for this, “is not at your disposal but God’s. The whole point of Calvin’s reformation was that he created a place in the church for the solid, pious, educated layman.”

  “Pious,” I said. “Faithful to the duties naturally owed.”

  “Exactly. I am not interested in a wife who professes great faith and makes a show of her religiosity.”

  “We’ve only met,” I said faintly.

  “I’m not an expert at the trivial,” he said. “If we are interested in pursuing this, if this should go further, shouldn’t we clear the air from the start?”

  “Tell me about the Presbyterian church,” I said. And was given a copy of the Westminster Confession to take home, plucked from the stack of books and papers on the bed, as if placed there in advance for me.

  When it was late, he simply cleared the bed, pulled back the spread, turned out the light and reached for my hand.

  It was quite the most thrilling lovemaking I’d ever experienced. There, without our clothes, with no fumbling around, he kept himself aroused with one hand and stroked me with the other until he brought me to orgasm, slowly, kissing me the while, and then, mounting, quickly came himself. Early in the morning, when I stirred slightly, he indicated that he would like to repeat what he had done before, and did.

  It was a year before we married; I had a lot of reservations about taking on the job of pastor’s wife—which I saw before me in capital letters, Pastor’s Wife, sort of like Goody Tait. I had read by then my histories of the church in America. Knew that Jonathan Edwards had been turned out of his pastorate at forty-seven with ten living children because he changed his view regarding admission of the unconverted to take the sacrament. That Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard, had been removed from his post for deciding that infant baptism was wrong. That Anne Hutchinson had been driven from the church, delivered unto Satan, and accounted to be a liar for accusing her clergy of preaching salvation through works not faith. Was it any wonder I was fearful of incurring the enmity of my newfound church “family”?

  Eben soothed me when I talked of it, saying that it was one’s duty only to act as if one was a member of the elect; that one could do no more. That in time the roots I was sinking into the Scriptures and the Confession would bear far sweeter blooms for the rocky soil they grew from.

  At first I wondered why he had chosen me. What did he want? Surely there were meeker girls, filled with sanctity and probity, who were eager for the job. Later, I grew more secure that he had not wanted someone to receive his sermons by rote and cant; that he had wanted a careful reader. And this I had been for him from the start. Faithful to him always in this way if in no other.

  AT LEAST TONIGHT I would not have to deal with his wanting to make love. He approached me only on Sundays after his sermon and on Wednesdays after his evening of Bible study. This was a routine he had had since the first, except for the brief years of Play School when our Thursdays were free.

  I’d thought then, in Baby Days, that things might change between us with the sudden gift of a day alone. Anyone who has had small children knows that immense erotic feel of an empty house with no one in it. No one asking for anything, or interrupting, or needing you. Lord, my whole body felt a rush of desire up my legs at just the space and vacancy of the empty parsonage. I’d thought that Eben would feel this, too, would rejoice that we didn’t have to have our intimate moments soundlessly behind the closed doors of our bedroom, or whisper together as far from the babies as possible, letting our oatmeal get cold while we talked over the schedule of the coming week.

  But it was as if Eben retreated more because there was no one about. He’d agreed to free his schedule on Thursdays, to spend the mornings through lunch at home, perhaps a part of the afternoons. But the first day my Tonka-truck girls were safely off in the firm hands of the Swedish contingent at Mary Virginia’s, he’d gone straight to the private room with his sermon notes and closed the door, staying in until lunchtime. After that, when I suggested a nap, he’d agreed, not meeting my eyes, and we did that, just that, lay on top of the spread and slept an hour with the blinds down. It was restorative, he said, a good idea. Turn it off for a while.

  I tried what I knew to do, my body thrilled with being slim again, unpregnant, very needy for attention, having spent the better part of three years being myself primarily a nourisher. The next week, Thursday, when Eben was in the bedroom, dressing after the children were gone, pulling up his braces, getting that disappearing look on his face, I threw my arms around him from the back, pressed my face against his shoulder, and touched him through his trousers, feeling him stiffen. He turned on me, red-faced and angry. “It cheapens you and therefore us, Cile, for you to make such an—out-of-character gesture.”

  The next week, I tried once more. When we were lying down for our nap, shades drawn, a wind whipping them against the screens, the whir of a lawn mower down the street, I rolled over and put my tongue in his ear, something I recalled from my single days as the gentlest, clearest kind of invitation. Perhaps it seemed too practiced to him. He sat up, again almost blinded by his anger, or maybe panic at having a respo
nse he had not himself orchestrated. “This is not some film, Cile, that you can parody. We have our way of doing things which is grounded in who we are.”

  It was clear to me then, just freshly freed from birthing and nursing, that my body, wild to be fed, was going to go hungry here. I saw that I was not going to be allowed to arouse him ever, to touch him ever in order to begin things, ever to straddle him, ever to move beneath him for my own pleasure, ever to bring him to orgasm in my own ways.

  I let a week go by, and then I asked him to talk to me, sitting with my hands between my knees, anxious, on the footstool in the bedroom while he pulled on his socks.

  “What is it, Cile?” he asked, his full attention to fitting the black hose firmly over his toe and heel. He looked up, to show that he was not avoiding listening to me, that he was available to me.

  “We have been given a gift of this free day once a week. I’d like it if you could see your way clear to changing our schedule because of this. Giving us a chance to do on Thursdays what we have always had to crowd into your busy Wednesdays.”

  He paused, put on his other sock, fitted it carefully to his foot. Put on his shoes. Reached in his pants’ pocket for the tiny calendar he carried with him always. “Your point is well taken. Perhaps we could go over the order of the service, the texts that I am considering, our schedule, on a day that was less structured, after the Bible study evening is behind me.”

  Feeling as if I were walking on eggs, I held my breath, and sure enough, he thought it through in his head, in his own way and his own good time. He worked in the study in the morning, then took off early for talk over lunch, going over the schedule, discussing with me—what we always did best—which verses of Scripture might most ably make the point for the week. What sort of overarching structure should be imposed on the five Sundays after Easter before the start of Trinity. What sort of pentateuch he should make of them. I knew that pentateuch meant vessel and that he must know I knew that, know that I heard him say not only what quintet of scriptures must he construct but also what vessel for his message must they be. We smiled over our plates, he with his cup of tea, drained, me with my coffee. We were at our best with texts.