Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  How could we remember such different things? I asked myself, suddenly angry. The real question—the question I didn’t yet know to ask myself—was how could she remember what I had never told her?

  I looked at Chris and didn’t know her. She was the far coast, rising to a different dawn, to a view I did not know and had long ago stopped trying to imagine. I want you closer! I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I opened my mouth to speak and faltered. She looked at me expectantly. “What is it?” she asked.

  “You don’t do enough,” I blurted out. “I need more help. With the kids, with the house, with everything. You don’t do enough, and it’s making me miserable.”

  Chris’s face hardened. “So am I,” she said. “When we get home, I think you should start looking for a job. Get out of the house. That way I could finally work less.”

  I was stunned. I hadn’t meant to get us here—oh, how I hadn’t meant to get us here, here to this place where I always got us! But I wasn’t going to back down.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Good idea.”

  “You know,” she said with a harsh smile, “our life is like that Ethan Hawke line in Before Sunset, ‘We used to be married and now we’re two people who run a childcare center together.’”

  I took a long drink, emptying my sangria glass. I hated few things as much as I hated her quoting that line, which she did with infuriating regularity. I hated the line because Ethan Hawke says it to a woman who is not his wife (and with whom he is about to have sex); I hated it because I was the one running the damn childcare, not Chris.

  But this time I was so angry I decided to agree with her. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly who we are.” And then I began to cry so hard that it became clear we couldn’t stay in the restaurant. And even if I could have stopped, there was no point in staying—the date was ruined. Chris told me to go wait outside while she paid the check. I bumped the edge of the table as I got up; my drink spilled, my napkin fell to the floor, but I kept walking.

  I pushed open the door and pulled on my coat. I had been sweating in the restaurant and now I was freezing and shivery and still crying. I walked across the street to our car and saw that our parking meter had expired. I didn’t know if I should put more money in it—I had no idea where we were going now, or what we were going to do. I started to open my purse, to rummage its depths for quarters. And then suddenly, in one instant, I understood the strangest thing, and I understood it completely: the way to Chris was not toward Chris. It was toward everything I turned away from so that I could love her. And for a moment, a moment that I can only know as grace, this fact didn’t frighten me. And by the time it did, I understood it clearly enough to know that, frightening or not, it had become an entirely inevitable truth.

  And then Chris was next to me. “Let’s drive somewhere,” I said, and without waiting for her I got into the driver’s seat and turned on the car. She got in, and I turned up the heat and drove us slowly, on ice-rutted roads, to a neighborhood near the restaurant. We got out of the car and when we were both on the sidewalk I looked at Chris. “I like my life,” I said. “I do. But it’s not enough.”

  Chris nodded. She didn’t ask me to explain and I didn’t try to.

  “Let’s walk,” I said. And then I bent my head, because I was crying and couldn’t stop and didn’t want to explain why.

  She held out her hand for me, and I took it. The sidewalks were snow-packed and icy, and I leaned into her with each step, and for the first time in a long while I relaxed against her solid and unyielding body.

  I had been jealous of Chris, jealous, I told myself, of her career, her confidence, her closet full of suits and her good haircut. But what I really wanted was Chris’s wholeness, the way that everything that mattered to her made it into her life and her days. Even the things she longed for but couldn’t have were always in her mind and our conversations; they were in the books on her bedside table and the movies she watched late at night. She was not afraid of what she wanted, even those things she could not have because she had a wife and children now.

  It was true that I wanted the things we fought over. I wanted her to take the kids more, and to appreciate all the housework I did, in the same way she wanted me to offer some thanks that she went to work every day. Our arrangement was a risky one, with many faults. But we could weather that. What we could no longer weather was my secret longing, my aging grief over the God I had given up for Chris. We could no longer weather my tired and childish longing for a towering statue to remind me of what I believed. The remembering was up to me.

  19

  Easter

  A month later, in the coldest hours of a January night, the West Cummington Church burned to the ground. A fire started in the furnace and set the nearly two-hundred-year-old wooden church ablaze. The fire department contained the fire but the building was destroyed. The water from the fire hoses ran down the road like a river and froze.

  The work parties began in the spring and volunteers spent long afternoons pulling every last nail from the few timbers that remained so that they could be planed and used in the new church that would be built right on those ruins. I didn’t go to the work parties. Every time I drove on the road below Church Hill I looked up and saw that there was nothing there, nothing where there was once the most eternal, most seemingly permanent something. The absence of the church was like an optical illusion. It was like magic. It was like death.

  All spring when I would run into people I hadn’t seen in a long time they would offer condolences about the church. I heard about your church, they would say, how terrible, how sad. Yes, I would say, it is, it was. I felt guilty when I thanked people for their sympathies. Aside from Christmas Eve, I had not been in the West Cummington Church for nearly a year before it burned. I was as far away from it as I had ever been.

  The Easter after the fire, I didn’t go to church, even though services were still being held, at the Parish House down the hill from the site of the old church. Instead we lingered through the morning’s egg hunt, and in the late afternoon we went to the house of our friends Cyndy and Hanno for dinner.

  I was standing at the kitchen sink when their five-year-old daughter, Greta, walked into the room and asked, “Is anyone here a Christian?” The kitchen was filled with girls and their mothers. Some of the girls were wearing eyeliner for the first time; one of them—June—was just a toddler. The girls were sitting at the counter eating shrimp dumplings and drinking passion-fruit juice while we—their mothers—cooked and drank gin and snuck chocolate eggs from their Easter baskets. From the window over the sink I could see their fathers—and Chris—building a fire to roast lamb and hot dogs and, when the flames were low enough, marshmallow peeps.

  “I am not,” said Michele, the mother of an eye-lined girl. “I am an agnostic.”

  I turned from the sink to look at Greta. “Do you know what agnostic means?” I asked her. She shook her head. Michele started to explain but Greta slid from her bar stool before Michele could finish. Greta grabbed Grace’s arm and a moment later I saw both of them run across the grass toward the fire.

  “Our Seder was last night,” Cyndy explained, “and it’s a lot, you know? Greta wants to know: Am I a Jew or am I a Christian? She gets Passover, but what does she really know about Easter? I want to give it to her right; I want to tell her about the resurrection and the ascension; I want to show her the paintings. I want her to have the big Catholic myth.”

  I smiled at Cyndy, but I didn’t say anything. June, no longer content to sit on a big girl’s lap, was crying for me. I wiped my hands on my skirt and reached for her. She was tired and her face was sticky from chocolate and dumplings. I sat her on the counter next to the sink, put a stockpot under the tap, and let it fill with cold water. I turned and held up my glass when Cyndy walked past me with the cocktail shaker; I took a bite of a dumpling and offered the rest to June, who ate it from my fingers.

  Greta came back inside, breathless from her sprint across the law
n. She smelled like fire and melting snow. I wanted to tell her I was a Christian. I’m a Christian, I wanted to say, and do you know what that means? It means that I believe Jesus is the child of God, and that he loves justice and he loves us, and he wants us to see God in each other.

  But I didn’t tell Greta anything. I was in my own promised land, right there in that kitchen filled with dear and kindred friends, friends who had not been easy to find. How could I say such an unexpected thing to these women with whom I shared my life now, this life of bodies and logistics and day following day following day? They knew what I thought about night nursing and homeschooling and the last season of Friday Night Lights, but they didn’t know anything about what I believed, or what I called myself. How strange, I thought, that what I believe suddenly seems, as it did all those years ago in Philadelphia, like the only thing that really matters at all.

  There was no church on the hill anymore, but there was still Steve, and so a few days after Easter I paid him a visit. The windows in his office were open to the sounds of birdcall and the river, and the two-lane highway beyond. The office was small: there was room for a desk, a few chairs, and an OED, open on a stand. We talked about small things, about the girls and about the goings-on in the town around us. We talked—as we were all beginning to talk then—about the new fame of our neighbor Rachel Maddow.

  After a few minutes I began to explain to Steve why I had called him the day before and asked for a meeting. And when I did, I began to cry. Through my tears I told Steve how much I loved the West Cummington Church, but that I was afraid it was not quite right for me, that I needed something else, that I needed the Catholic Church, which I loved once and might still love, but was a million miles from me now. I told him how impossible it was to be married to a woman, to have two children with her, and to still find a home in the Catholic Church. This might have sounded like the excuse I offered to him all those years ago when I was pregnant with Grace, but in reality it was the opposite, perhaps because now I believed it to be true.

  “I could go,” I said, wiping my teary cheeks with the back of my hand, “if we had some sort of different life, you know, if we lived in a city”—and here, even in the moment, I knew that I was entering into some world of childish and magical thinking—“if I could walk out of our house on a Sunday morning and down the block to the Catholic Church.” I was articulating, consciously or not, the fantasy of returning to my basement chapel, to the easy closeness of it, the familiarity of its stone steps, its dark pews and chipping statues. The fantasy of a free and faithful young self.

  “If I could be part of it again,” I continued, “even in the smallest way, so that I could see if it was where I really belonged.”

  “You don’t need a different life,” Steve said, kindly calling my bullshit. “Turn right at the bottom of the hill some Sunday morning and drive yourself to the Catholic Church.”

  “And what will I tell Chris?” I asked him, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  “That this is who you are and what you need,” he said. “Or, you will tell her nothing.”

  Steve didn’t ask why I didn’t want to tell Chris. Even if he had, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Not yet, at least. I had not, until this moment, allowed myself to acknowledge that Hector was not the only person who believed my love for Chris and my love for Catholicism were incompatible. Chris believed it too.

  We talked for a few more minutes, and then Steve walked me to my car. “I read something about Mary Oliver once,” he said, “something about her showing up late for dinner at a friend’s house—really late—and when she finally arrived, she told them that a poem had caught her, and she had to sit down at her desk and write. She told them not to worry about her if she were late again, or even if she failed to show up completely. She would be fine; she would be doing something essential. When I read that, I thought, well that’s pretty self-involved of her.” Steve laughed, rolling his eyes. “But as I thought about it more I came to genuinely admire her devotion.” He looked at me, so kindly. “I’m glad you came today,” he said, “so that when I don’t see you here, I will know why, and I won’t worry.”

  On Sunday morning I turned right at the bottom of the hill. I drove to St. Elizabeth’s in Northampton, where I entered though the side door and found a seat near the back. I kicked down the kneeler and went gently onto my knees.

  During the service I watched a woman in the pew in front of mine, a pretty woman dressed in khaki shorts, a thin, white sweater over her shoulders. She didn’t sing (no one sang, really, although I did, loudly); she didn’t respond to the responsorial Psalms. She rose and kneeled at the appropriate times; she gently embraced her husband during the passing of the peace. I stood behind her in the communion line and as she approached the priest she took a small gold box from her pocket, opened the latch, and held it in her hands. The priest put one host in her box and one in her open palm. She ate the host from her hand and then closed her box, put it back in her pocket. Who would she deliver it to, I wondered? Who was too sick, too fragile to come here and receive for herself? I thought of Nana on her sunporch, and the woman who brought the Eucharist to her that Easter morning. And then it was my turn to hold out my hand. I wished I also had a box. It was enviable, this chance to lock the host away. To save it. But I only had my hand, and for a moment I thought of keeping the host until I got back to my pew, then slipping it carefully into my bag. But I didn’t. With my tongue I pushed it against the roof of my mouth, where it began to dissolve, and then was gone.

  20

  Sisters of Wisdom

  As a child I had one Catholic friend. Her name was Denise. In second grade Denise bragged about her first communion dress, which I coveted. (Decades later the Catholic girls in my own daughters’ second-grade classes would brag about their first communion dresses, which my daughters would also covet.) Denise had something else I adored: a stack of cards on her dining room table printed with red roses and the words “All Life Is Precious,” in curling cursive script. “You can have one,” Denise said, holding up her finger in case I didn’t understand what the word “one” meant. How I loved that card. I knew it was somehow connected to the “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” bumper sticker on Denise’s wood-paneled station wagon, but I wasn’t entirely sure how. I also loved Denise’s mother, who had short, graying hair and thick black glasses. She was from “back east” and talked much more loudly than other girls’ moms. She insisted Denise go to CCD and later that she become an altar girl, obligations Denise found taxing but I thought seemed rather exciting.

  Twice a year Denise’s mother went on retreat to a monastery in the mountains. When I asked Denise what her mother did on retreat, she said, “Oh, she talks to God. And priests.” Once I happened to be at Denise’s house when her mother returned from her two days in the mountains with God and priests. Her face was terribly sunburned. “I fell asleep!” she said, her hands to her cheeks. “In the sun, on a stone bench. I was praying and then I was asleep. I slept for four hours! I was in heaven.”

  I thought of Denise’s mother when I checked in for a three-day retreat at Wisdom House, an interfaith retreat center in the Berkshires. I wasn’t there to talk to priests, and maybe not even to talk to God. But I did want to fall asleep on a stone bench in the sun, depite the fact that it was only May in chilly New England. I wanted that heaven.

  “May I sit here?” I asked a table of gray-haired nuns at my first dinner. I was uncertain of the protocol, the seating arrangements. It had been a long time since my own dining hall years. In those days it was three glasses of water, cottage cheese on my salad. Now it was quinoa-stuffed peppers and baked cod.

  “Please, please,” the women said in unison. I knew these women were nuns because the nun who showed me to my room told me as much, and I also knew because, quite honestly, they looked like nuns. No habits, but gray hair dominated, as did sensible shoes and simple cross pendants hanging low over cardigans and collared sweatshirts.

 
“Are you here for the workshop?” the woman sitting next to me asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m here on my own.”

  Someone asked about my family, and I told them I had two young daughters. “Where are they this weekend?” one asked.

  “At home,” I said.

  “Weekend with Dad,” one of them said with a smile.

  “Actually with Mom,” I said. “I’m married to a woman.” I didn’t always correct people’s mistaken assumptions about my sexual orientation. But there were two circumstances in which I always did: when I was with the girls, and when I wanted the person who made the assumption to know exactly who I was.

  If my correction was troubling to any of these women they did not let on.

  Before that first dinner was over it was clear to me that these were not ordinary women. One was a sculptor and accomplished fiddle player; one a high school theater teacher; and another had returned, that afternoon, from a year’s mission in the Northwest Territories. She told us that the previous morning at dawn someone came bearing a caribou to the rectory she shared with a Jesuit priest, and they butchered the animal together on the long kitchen table. “My mission up there was being,” she said. “I was there to live, to witness, and today, back here,” she said with a sad smile, “I am a bit adrift. What will I be called to do? Something wonderful, certainly, but right now I have no idea what that is.”

  The nuns spent that first dinner catching up. Those who didn’t live together knew each other from other retreats, other projects. Who signed the protest letter, one wanted to know, about the Vatican investigation of American nuns? All of them. One asked when another friend would arrive. “Oh, I didn’t know she was coming!” the woman next to me said. “I haven’t seen her since last summer when she made us all jump off that dock.”