by Lisa Samson
After another psalm, Rick starts asking people what’s going on in their lives, eliciting a few stories, then prays a long time, both for the ones who spoke and for the ones who didn’t. When he’s done, he sets his Bible on the table, looking around at us as if he’s not sure how to proceed.
“A month or two back,” he says, “instead of speaking or preaching, I just read you guys a story. Remember that? I had this idea that the story could preach as well as I could, or even better. This got me thinking about what else could preach. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I can’t hear anymore. You tell me the truth, I know it’s true, and somehow I still can’t receive it. My walls are up. It takes some new way of speaking to get through to me. To hear from an unexpected source, though, you have to learn how to listen. That’s what I want to try tonight. This is going to be strange, maybe, but bear with me.
“The night I read that story, there was a woman here. Some of you have met her, others haven’t. I’m talking about Bel, Sara’s aunt. If you have met her, you know what an unusual and challenging kind of life she’s lived, how outside the box her experience has been. For the last twenty years she was on the mission field. She only just came back. And she’d never read anything by Flannery O’Connor before, but after I shared that story, she took to O’Connor like fire to a haystack. That particular story I read fascinated her. The vision of a different kind of Jesus than we’re accustomed to, not the smiling, happy Jesus who wants to make your every wish come true, but a transcendent and demanding Jesus … that really captured her imagination, because that was the Jesus she’d come to know overseas. Something funny happened after that. Bel had never tried to paint before, but she had it in her head she’d like to. I’ll let Finn pick up the story here, because he saw it firsthand.”
Rick motions to Finn, who is still leaning against the table with the guitar strapped over his shoulder.
“Well,” he says, clearing his throat, pausing, not at all comfortable speaking in front of people despite having no trouble singing in front of them. “Like Rick said, she’d never done any painting, but had this crazy idea it’s what she should do. We got her some supplies and she went at it down in the basement, over and over again, day after day. Sara would go down there after work and watch her at it. Bel was … obsessive, driven. And I realized after a while that she wasn’t trying to paint paintings. There was just one painting she was working on, again and again. She’d get it wrong, not knowing how to translate the vision in her mind onto the canvas. Finally, she did this.”
He leaves the table and walks over to the square painting all alone on the wall.
“If you remember the story, the guy gets a tattoo of Jesus, but not the smiling Jesus Rick just talked about. The story calls it the ‘flat stern Byzantine Christ’ and says the eyes are all-demanding. Kind of imperious, you know—you can’t look away from them. They follow you, seeing everything. That’s what Bel was seeing, and that’s what she wanted to capture, and that’s what you see here, her interpretation of that Christ.”
This comes as a shock to me, as real as the breathless icy grip Aunt Bel felt when she plunged into the river. I stare at that black-and-gold muddle and know that my jaw has dropped. Under my nose, night after night, she had made this image of the face of Jesus, and I had never even recognized it as such, and have a hard time doing so now. And it doesn’t make me like the painting any better. In fact, I hate it even more.
I strain forward, willing my eyes to see. But it still looks like burnt toast to me, reminding me of the person who saw the face of the Virgin Mary on his grilled cheese and then listed the miracle on eBay—because that’s what we Americans do in the presence of the holy, sell it off. What had Rick said? “To hear from an unexpected source, you have to learn how to listen.” I want to see this. I need to see it. The way things were left between Aunt Bel and me is wrong, and like I told Huey, I’m not done with her. I know that. If I could look at this painting and see what she saw, see through her eyes—
Rick is talking now, explaining what he wants us to do. Instead of listening to him speak, he wants us to look. “Everyone stand, everyone stand and line up, and we’ll approach one by one. You get as close as you want, for as long as you want, and I only ask you to do one thing: let it preach.”
We get up. Holly brushes her jeans off—force of habit—and gives me a conspiratorial raised eyebrow. The setting is new to her, I realize, but Rick is not. She’s been a spectator to his journey for much longer than I have.
As the line forms, I hesitate, letting it get longer and longer before I finally join in. This is the strangest thing that’s happened at the Microchurch. I can tell it makes a few people uncomfortable and leaves a few more confused. Maybe Finn will have his wish and half of these people won’t be back. Or maybe, just maybe, the picture will speak to them as Rick hopes.
“You okay?” Holly whispers.
I nod, wondering what my face is giving away. This is the painting I saw Aunt Bel run her hands over, the one I snatched from the wall and nearly threw to the ground. I’ve had more opportunities to see it than anyone here, but did I ever truly look? How did Finn know about this—and Rick!—but I did not? I feel blindsided by this revelation about Aunt Bel’s work. Or simply blind. I’ve been judging by the standard of skill what was done from devotion, however obsessed, driven, and dark. Born in that darkness of the basement beneath my feet and now radiant in the gallery’s bright light.
It takes a long time for me to reach the painting. People are following Rick’s advice, taking their time. When they’ve looked awhile, some up close, others distant (maybe afraid to advance too near), they file toward the far side of the gallery where I stood earlier, congregating in twos and threes to process what they’ve seen.
“You go first,” I tell Holly.
To avoid looking at the painting, I watch Holly instead. She stands with one leg ahead of the other, hands on her hips, tilting her head slightly like she can’t quite work out the right angle from which to view the image. I can’t see her expression, but her body language reads as skepticism. She stands before Aunt Bel’s Christ the way she would before a picture at the museum, sizing it up, perhaps wondering about its value.
“Impressive.”
She turns and says this to me in the tone of a woman rendering her verdict on a piece of art, an informed opinion from someone in the know. She is also letting me know, because this is my aunt’s work and she must have picked up on my inner turmoil, that there’s nothing for me to be ashamed of here, no reason to think the picture is unworthy just because it was done by an amateur and a relative.
She doesn’t see it either, I think.
Holly is as blind to Aunt Bel’s Christ as I am, as insulated and cut off. As she steps away to join the others, I edge forward, watching my toes the way a high diver might, approaching a precipice and using all my attention not to move too far and fall.
Then I look up. The painting seems larger viewed head-on from maybe five feet away. Also more distant. I cannot imagine reaching for it, cannot imagine ever having touched it. It feels too far from me now, too inaccessible. I do see the face rising down the middle of the canvas like a ridge of volcanic rock, the cratered darkness of the mouth and eyes. He does not smile or beckon, but he is not imperial and aloof either. He is of the earth, even molten, as if he has stepped through fire in order to be seen. This is not the Jesus of O’Connor’s story, or the temple-stalking Christ depicted in the Gospels.
Go back, the eyes said to Parker in the story, and I look to Aunt Bel’s painting as if her Christ might speak too.
Aunt Bel’s Christ looks back at me now.
Go back, he says to me. Go back.
Who are you? I think.
But I know the answer. This Jesus is my Jesus. Aunt Bel’s Christ is mine. And she’s realized the Good Shepherd we’d been told about was not the Good Shepherd at all. He was the flat, stern Byzantine Christ who loved selectively or not at all.
18.
The Flat Stern Byzantine Christ
My dad is not adjusting well to Bel’s presence at his house. “Things are not going smoothly. Your mother’s washed her hands of the whole thing. No surprise there. But I didn’t think you would follow her example, doll.”
Though he speaks in a calm, reasonable tone, he might as well be screaming. The rebuke hits me hard enough to push the phone away from my ear.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t wash my hands of Aunt Bel. She walked out. You can’t blame me for that.”
“So you’d take her back?” A hot air balloon of hope raises his voice to a higher pitch.
“Is that what she wants?”
“How the heck should I know? It’s not like if I ask her she’ll give me an answer. You’ll have to do that yourself. And my advice is to come in person. Don’t try something like this over the phone. There’s too much room for misunderstanding.”
No kidding.
“Hey, what’s that swishing sound?” he asks.
That swishing sound is from the voluminous pink taffeta dress Holly is adjusting around my feet. I’m standing on a carpeted pedestal watching a candy princess version of myself reflected in a three-way mirror, hating the look every bit as much as I said I would.
“It’s horrible,” I say, hanging up the phone, handing it back to the hovering salesgirl, who seems to share my fear of the dress. She places it on top of my bag, not sure who to pledge allegiance to here, and rightly figuring not to meddle. “Not only does it make me look like a cake topper, but they’ve put some kind of lining in here that’ll flay your skin right off. Is it supposed to be so uncomfortable?”
Before the princess dress, there was the junior high prom number cinched tight under the bust, with frilly layers stopping half a foot short of my knees. The dress looked like someone had shrunk it in the dryer and hiked up my body too high.
“I was thinking something simple,” I say, now back on the floor and sliding hangers across the poles from which they hang lifelessly. “Classic. Maybe black, and formfitting without being too tight?”
Holly throws her hands up. “Black? Did you say black? Girl, when do you even get an opportunity to dress up like this? And you’re going to waste it on a little black dress.”
“A lot of these dresses, they don’t look right on me. I don’t have the right kind of body for them.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says. “Girls like us, we’re pretty lucky, you know that? Having kids just wrecks you, but we can wear anything we want.”
Girls like us.
Childless, she means. I gaze into the mirror, trying to see what she sees.
“How do you stand it at church?” I ask. “Do you not get the same sideways comments I did about not getting with the program?”
“I did at first. But they saw how hard I tried. We tried,” she says.
“So it wasn’t exactly your decision.”
“Adoption is very big right now. But Eric …”
“I’m sorry.”
“What about you?” she asks.
I shrug, look at her open face, and figure, client or not, if she isn’t safe, I can find that out right now. “I don’t know if I even want children, Holly. How terrible is that?”
I stare into her eyes, my breathing halted as I wait.
She doesn’t blink but takes my hand. “It’s your decision to make, Sara. Not mine or anybody else’s. Only you know what’s right for you and there are too many examples of really good people who don’t become parents.”
Men too, is what she’s saying.
She holds on to the dress pole in front of us. “Sara, you’re a good person. And it may not mean much, but I’d never dream of questioning a decision like that on your part. First of all, like those women at The Community, it’s not my business but yours and Finn’s. And second of all, even if it was, I’d support you. Period.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because that’s what we women should do for each other in the first place.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, taking her hand and giving it a light squeeze. “Let’s find that dress.”
She takes the hint that I can only take so much soul baring and sends me back to the dressing room. Two minutes later she shows up with a shimmery mermaid-bottomed number made of ombré silk, light gray on top and deepening into dark navy by the time it reaches the floor. Strapless too, because as I’ve learned, Holly has no qualms about showing other people’s skin.
I try on the mermaid dress and a couple of others, trying to get into the spirit of the day—or at least to appear on board. My dad’s words keep eating away at me. Does he really think I’m taking after Mom? That’s absurd.
Too exposed. Too covered up. Too tight in the bust, too full in the hips. Too bright. Too somber. There’s an objection to everything I try on, and I’m usually the first one to make it. At first I feel guilty raising objections, afraid of hurting Holly’s feelings, but she turns out to be imperturbable. The more I say no, the more dresses I have to try on, which is apparently all the fun. I have a feeling Holly Ringwald doesn’t have a favorite soft T-shirt, and I’ll bet she wears heels around the house. Or maybe she knows that when something is special, it’s a crime to settle for anything other than what you love.
“Less bridesmaid, more cocktail dress,” Holly explains to the salesgirl.
Eventually they bring me another one in taffeta—dark purple this time, with a scoop neck and a full, flouncy skirt that hits just above the knee. I start to object, then stop. It’s clean and modern, with a touch of feminine whimsy in the bow at the waist. When I slip it on, the dress could have been made for me.
“You have to go through a lot of frogs to find your prince,” Holly declares. “I know you were doubting me, but this is the one.”
“You think so?”
“Sara, look at you.”
She’s right. It looks good. I left the house this morning with advice from Finn that you only live once, the business is doing fine, and I deserve a little treat. So I take him at his word and give the shopgirl a nod. “This one.”
“And it’s not even noon,” Holly says. “Lunch?”
“I have to bail on you, I’m afraid. That phone call was from my dad. He wants me to drive out and talk to Aunt Bel, see if I can talk her into coming back. She left my place and is staying with him.”
“Is that what you want?” she asks.
“To be honest, yes. I think I do. My family’s kind of a mess, Holly.”
“Sara, that’s the only kind of family I even begin to understand.”
Holly drives me home with the top of her convertible down, the wind whisking my short hair into a spiky mess. As she pops the trunk and removes my plastic-sheathed dress, I can tell she’s got something on her mind. She holds the dress out to me and says, “You know something? The best thing about this is, I think I’ve made a new friend. This was fun, right? I think it was.”
“I had a blast. Next time, though, you can try on the dresses and I’ll just watch.”
She gives me a hug. “Deal.”
I hang the dress up in the bedroom closet and head straight for my car. I’ll relieve Dad soon enough, but there’s someone else I need to talk to, and maybe she’ll tell me the truth for a change. Maybe she’ll tell me why her relationship with her sister was shattered in more pieces than seems possible to put together again.
Because in all of these relationships interconnected with filament as fine as a spider’s silk, theirs seems to be at the center of it all.
My mother’s “campsite” is on the back ten acres, across Deer Creek, at Happy Hideaway Farm in northern Baltimore County. She went to college with J. D. Rebel, the owner, a person who thoroughly lived up to his last name in his youth. Now he channels that energy into a place where small festivals are held and organic farming erupts in joyful fields bordered by flowers of all kinds. It’s nothing short of a wonderland and maybe, just
maybe, I’d live in a tent to be around it all the time.
Mom’s tent, on the other hand, well, not so much.
The gold-and-red two-person dome tent sits on the other side of the creek and is accessible by a small footbridge. She does this on purpose. “If I can’t carry it to the tent, I don’t need it.” She was, thankfully, able to carry two bright red Adirondack chairs that she’s placed in front of the tent, along with pots of perennial flowers and herbs that are just coming out of dormancy. Bamboo poles driven into the ground dangle all variety of items, mostly found by her along the side of the road and repurposed into yard art. My mother’s aesthetic is very different from my own, but in its ability to make do and turn the castaway into something that shimmers and moves and sometimes even whistles when the wind is right, she expresses herself beautifully and in a style all her own.
I pull down the gravel drive, past the main buildings of the farm, including J. D.’s small cob house, an octagonal structure that looks like a hobbit resides inside. Which maybe one does. J. D., five-foot-three and probably weighing in at 110 pounds, waves to me from the pump where he’s getting water for his mule. He plows his fields with the mule, so the thought of having an old college friend on the back acreage of his land is probably nothing out of the ordinary.
They had something once. I’m not sure if it was just a spring break fling or maybe even a longer relationship, but from what I can tell, they both realized they were more suited to friendship without those sorts of benefits.
I like J. D. He may be little, but he looks out for her, and is more than capable of keeping her safe. Not to mention, he’s big into generosity when it comes to his crops. I wave back.
I park beside the field where several of the horses he boards are lying in the sun. Mom is usually home from whatever job she’s doing by four, preferring an early start. Good. Her bike is leaning against the railing of the bridge.
“Hey, you!” she calls, standing up from her raised garden bed where she’s been preparing the soil for her summer vegetable garden.
