by N. Griffin
“This meeting of the Girls’ Friendly Society, Saint Francis Church chapter, shall commence,” says Bernadine once everyone has settled into folding chairs. “All present say aye!”
“Aye!”
Ms. Dugan winks at Dinah and rolls her eyes.
Bernadine stands up at the whiteboard and uncaps a dry-erase marker. “Four members present and accounted for; note that please in the minutes, Mother.”
Dinah glares at Mrs. Chatham and holds up her hand, all fingers outstretched. Mrs. Chatham becomes very busy with her notebook, eyes firm on the page, but two red spots bloom on her cheeks.
“Item one,” says Bernadine, and writes 1. CLOTHING on the whiteboard. She glances at Skint. “All donations of winter clothing collected by the membership have been sorted and sent to the appropriate organizations. Leftover items can be found in the box at the back of this room and are free for the taking.” She clears her throat. “Coats and the like.”
She turns and writes 2. THANKS. “Item two. The membership thanks Alma Chatham for the fine muffins she has provided for tonight’s refreshments. Get that down in the minutes, please, Mother.”
Thanks to . . . , Mrs. Chatham writes. Her brow wrinkles. . . . me, she finishes uncertainly.
“Muffins!” How did Dinah miss them? She’d love a muffin.
“ORDER.”
“Behind you, toots.” Ms. Dugan nods at the snack basket.
Bernadine writes the third agenda item—APPROVAL—on the whiteboard and Dinah grabs two muffins under the cover of her turned back. She tosses one down the table to Skint and assumes an expression of intense attention-paying as Bernadine wheels back around.
“Next order of business,” Bernadine says, poised with her marker. “Approval of proposed upcoming projects—”
Skint clears his throat and Dinah looks at him, alarmed. Already? What? He is waggling his brows at her over his muffin. Does he want to start the shouting right now? But wasn’t he going to shout first?
“—of the Girls’ Friendly, followed by development of organizational structures to support same, namely and to wit—”
What should she do? Maybe he thinks she should start now because, as a girl, she is allowed to speak. But if she tries to interrupt Bernadine—to dress her down, no less—Bernadine will be furious and the shouting will be about that and not turkeys. What is Dinah supposed to do?
“—to raise funds to donate to the World Food Programme to help aid the people of—”
She better do something or else Skint’ll be angry and they’ll be at the part of the meeting where they are having to say aye and before you know it Bernadine will be bossing them around and Dinah will have lost Skint’s chance forever.
“Aye!” Dinah shouts.
The others, including Bernadine, stare at her.
“Sorry,” says Dinah. “I thought we were voting.”
At least there is a little break in the action so she has some time to think. Skint is looking questioningly at her over the teacup clutched in his hand and she would like to look questioningly at him right back, but exchanging looks would be unwise with Bernadine staring at her like this.
Bernadine squints at Dinah and harrumphs. “Well,” she says. “We may as well vote. All those in favor say aye.”
“Aye!” Dinah votes again, extra enthusiastically to make up for her coming treachery.
“Aye,” say the others.
“Motion passes four to zero. Note that please, Mother. Mother!”
Mrs. Chatham looks up from the Five she has written in her careful hand and blushes under Bernadine’s glare. She looks sideways at Dinah, but Dinah, her stomach tight, looks steadfastly the opposite way.
Mrs. Chatham crosses out her five for a four, and Bernadine moves on.
“Proposal number two, namely and to wit a regular schedule of visits to the elderly and infirm who make use of the Saint Francis Adult Day Services Center—”
Dinah’s stomach is killing her. Is Skint wimping out? Is she? Oh, she hates every part of this. Why can’t she be home, just playing with Beagie? Playing and hugging him and teaching him about words. Why does she have to be thinking about turkeys and people? Turkeys and people and lines at the food pantry. The lines here at Christmas with snow falling outside. Mrs. Rijekac waiting and wiping her glasses, Mr. King’s hand against the wall as he removed his boots, his shoes underneath shined and lovely.
Shined-up shoes and brogans to hold a Rural Route down. Thin plume of smoke too delicate for warming.
“Bernadine?”
“All those in—what, Dinah? Stop interrupting!”
“I’m sorry. I . . . I thought we were going to discuss. Before we vote.”
“You were awfully quick to vote a moment ago, Dinah.”
“I know. Sorry! But I have something to ask before we vote this time.”
“What is it, Dinah. Be quick.”
Skint is looking at her over his teacup again.
“Well, I have been thinking. About another proposal for us. Instead of the Center-visiting one.”
“Another proposal! Late stages for that, Dinah! Proposals were due last week for consideration by the membership.”
Yes, well, last week Dinah didn’t know what all was going to happen on the way here and she bets Bernadine would rather hear her idea than the other item on Skint’s docket, namely and to wit, shouting.
“Yes,” Dinah says, “I know. I’m sorry. But I didn’t have my idea yet last week.”
Ms. Dugan stubs out her unsmoked cigarette.
“Let her speak, Bernadine.”
Snort, snort, puff. “Well?”
“I was thinking.” Dinah plays with the handle of her cup. “The food pantry is a big job. For just one person. And you already do so much.”
Bernadine’s eyes narrow. So do Skint’s.
“So what I was thinking was that we—the Friendly—could run it together. Sort of as . . . sort of as a collective. To help. Because the job is big.”
“Is it.”
“There’s a lot of people that need help. . . .” Dinah trails off a bit. Would you look at all those eyes. Ms. Dugan’s are questioning, Mrs. Chatham’s worried. Dinah doesn’t dare look at Skint’s.
“Your solicitousness is kind, I am sure,” says Bernadine. “But I think it’s unnecessary. The job is not too big for me. I think it would be a waste of the group’s time and energy, especially with other worthy projects that need our attention. Such as the proposed work at the Center.”
“Um,” says Dinah. She might barf. Skint and his phone calls and we never do jack. “I mean more, though. I think the food pantry should . . . should expand. I mean we should expand it. Us. The Friendly.”
Up on the porch. Ring the bell. Hello, elderly RRs, can I help you in some way?
“I was thinking of kind of a delivery service.” The idea uncurls itself, slowly, as Dinah speaks it aloud. “We could bring food. Right to people. Who can’t get here. Who don’t have cars.” Or who Bernadine doesn’t like. “Or who live far. Or maybe who don’t even know about it. Or feel shy about coming.”
Fatten them up, warm them up, everybody included and getting lovely things. Bernadine no longer the boss of distributing and nobody given anything inedible or unspeakable, or nothing at all.
And she’ll make Mr. Beach talk to Bernadine, alone, and she and Skint can make sure about the food.
Dinah risks a glance at Skint. He is beaming.
See, he told her she was the nice one. All he wanted to do was beat the shit out of Bernadine.
Ms. Dugan looks proud of her, Mrs. Chatham pinkly interested. Bernadine notes this with alarm.
“We are a small church, Dinah! How much do you think we have to give away? And besides, you aren’t old enough to drive and neither is Sk—Mother doesn’t drive either. That means the load would fall to Ms. Dugan and me, and frankly, I do not see how that makes my job smaller, as it were.”
Dinah shakes her head. Her idea is blooming.
&nb
sp; “No, Bernadine! Not just you! Or even just us. I mean the Friendly would be in charge, but everybody helps. The whole church. We could figure out who could drive where and when and also have projects for everybody to help in some kind of way so no one feels jerky about being helped or smug because they did the helping, because everybody could be both. Like you need food but you can offer, I don’t know, singing lessons.”
That last part was kind of stupid but Dinah knows what she means.
“Sounds jazzy, Dinah B.,” says Ms. Dugan. “I don’t know, Bernadine, I like it.”
Oh, Ms. Dugan!
Bernadine’s eyes narrow. “Do you.”
“We could make a schedule!” Dinah cries. “A rota of duties!” A brilliant touch, she congratulates herself. Bernadine loves a rota of duties. “We could make an announcement in church—”
Bernadine cuts her off. “Oh, really? You’d deign to come to church, Dinah Beach?”
Dinah’s face begins to twist into a scowl, but she catches it and hastily reschools her features.
“I see what this is really about, Dinah.” Bernadine’s voice is steely.
Ms. Dugan looks at her quizzically.
“You don’t want to hang around in the Center. You’re a teenager,” says Bernadine, “and being around your mother would cramp your style.”
What is she talking about? But Dinah can’t pay attention to Bernadine’s outdated lingo when she is so happy about her own idea, and so relieved to be spared having to openly take on Bernadine’s food pantry exclusions.
“What does that mean, dear? ‘Cramp her style’?”
“It means she wants independence from her mother, Mother!”
What? Hey! “I do not!”
Wait a minute.
“Well, I guess I do, but that’s not why I want us to do this.”
“Oh, no?”
“No!”
“Then why? Are you telling me you don’t want to help the elderly?”
“No!”
“Bernadine, I don’t think that’s what she’s saying.”
“Really, Ms. Dugan! Then what is she saying, since you seem to understand her so well?”
“Bernadine—”
“It’s only that everybody already helps at the Center,” Dinah cuts in, aware that she is telling only a partial truth, which is next door to a technical truth, but there is only so much she can take on at once. “In school and things,” she continues. “Kids go there all the time. Brownies, Sunday school, everybody does that for a service project.”
“And well they should! Have you thought about what it feels like to be old, Dinah? And alone?”
Mrs. Chatham pinkens again.
“I volunteer at the Center myself,” says Bernadine, “and with the elderly at the hospital, too. And sometimes those visits are the one thing—” Her voice is shaking.
“But the people at the Center are visited to within an inch of their lives!” cries Dinah.
“Dinah Beach! I cannot believe that a daughter of your mother would be so uncaring—”
“Uncaring?” Skint. His voice is incredulous.
“Yes! I mean, ORDER! You will not speak out of turn, Dinah!”
“That was Skint, Bernadine!”
“Never mind!” Bernadine is nearly gnashing her teeth. “So do you want to curtail our efforts for disaster relief, too? You want to divert the money we raise to this . . . this unnecessary taxi service?”
Skint clears his throat. “That’s not what she said.”
Be quiet, Skint!
“Order!” shouts Bernadine hoarsely. “So it’s just the Pantry, then! You don’t approve of how I run it? Is that it?”
Saying no would go beyond partial or technical truth straight to lie, and not the helpful kind of lie. How did this get so hotted up? Skint is breathing hard over there and Dinah doesn’t know what to say.
“Oh, ho! That is it!”
“Now, dear—” Mrs. Chatham murmurs.
“Am I not organized enough? The cans not consistently arranged by contents within meal type? Or is it something else you don’t find to your liking?”
“Oh, good Cod!” says Skint.
The silence is total.
Bernadine draws in her breath.
“What did you say?”
Skint’s gaze is imperturbable, Ms. Dugan’s questioning, Mrs. Chatham’s fluttering and worried.
“Oh, Skint, how funny—I thought you said ‘Cod’!” Mrs. Chatham quivers, eager to dispel the tension even if she doesn’t understand its cause.
Silence.
“Bernadine?” Mrs. Chatham looks at Bernadine’s folded-in lips and red, red cheeks, then at Ms. Dugan, who is looking at Bernadine, too.
Dinah might barf.
Mrs. Chatham appeals to Skint.
“Skint, dear? What’s the matter? Did I say something?”
“At least let’s be consistent,” says Skint. “At least make it clear that, either home or away, needful people shall not be fed by the Girls’ Friendly.”
“Order!”
“Neither dollars nor canned goods nor Christmas turkey—”
“ORDER!”
“Better that some food should rot than be eaten by the wrong people—”
“That is enough!”
“—or that rotten food be eaten by the ones you think right.”
Ms. Dugan is still looking at Bernadine, with surprise now, and something like shock.
Bernadine presses her fists against the table and leans onto them.
“Our families worked when they came over here,” she hisses at Skint, beyond fury. “They worked.”
“So you think if someone’s out of work they should be punished until they are employed? Or until they get a visa?”
“Nonmembers are required to be silent!”
“Even in the face of bullsh—”
“THAT IS ENOUGH, DINAH!”
“Bernadine, that was Skint!”
“Those people can go down to Lewiston. The church in Lewiston is larger than we are—”
“We don’t live in Lewiston!” Skint shouts and Dinah can’t help herself, can’t sit by and let Skint be the only one to speak, Skint being brave after a year of Bernadine meanness, of watching unkindness and not speaking up. She shouts too.
“We live here! And so do all the people who came here at Christmas!”
“Leaving aside that you are not even really a member of this church yourself, Dinah Beach—”
“Oh, come now, sweetheart! Dinah is a wonderful member of our church—”
“Mother!” Bernadine’s voice shakes with rage. “Dinah, you do not go to church and have not graced a Sunday school class with your presence since you were five—”
“So what? I clean!”
“—so who are you to say who belongs here?”
“Well, who are you to say?” Dinah yells back recklessly. “I thought nobody was supposed to say! I thought that was the point! Anybody can come and help and be here. Otherwise there isn’t a point!”
“God is the point!”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping!” Hypocrites! Hypocrites! You pretend there is a God and it doesn’t even make you kind.
“How dare you,” says Bernadine. “How dare you?”
“Twenty-four turkeys in the freezer before Christmas,” Skint says softly, looking Bernadine in the eye. “Twenty-three turkeys still in the freezer after. I counted. I counted. Who got the one turkey, I wonder?”
Silence.
Dinah and Bernadine breathing and stormy-eyed; Skint calm, almost pleasant.
“Anyone who is not a member of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” Bernadine says at last, “may leave this room. Immediately.”
Skint gets up.
So does Dinah.
“Dinah Beach!”
“The piece of Cod,” says Skint, “that passeth all understanding.”
“Dinah!”
“Bernadine, THAT WAS SKINT!” Dinah slams the door open and she
and Skint slam out, Skint’s sarong whirling around his hips in an angry tangle. The door crashes shut behind them.
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” says Ms. Dugan.
The agenda for the meeting is on the whiteboard over Bernadine’s head. CLOTHING, it says. THANKS. APPROVAL.
“Sweet Jesus, be merciful,” says Ms. Dugan. “Bernadine, Bernadine.” She stands up and reaches for her coat.
Bernadine is hunched of shoulder, chin jammed onto fists. “Storming out like that,” she says. “Not even wearing a coat. He’ll catch his death.” Her eyes are dark. She puts her head in her hands.
What the heck happened in there? Dinah was angry and so was Bernadine. Skint, of course, as well. But why did Dinah join in? She should have calmed things. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t.
Nothing Dinah said was wrong. Then why does she feel so bad?
Unfair fighting. You shouldn’t yell like that. You shouldn’t wait and then burst around with the reasons you are mad. Is that why she feels so awful?
There’s more to it than that but Dinah can’t sort it out. Her mind is a tangly rage jangle of thin trails of smoke like singing and ankles in heavy shoes, images of Bernadine alone in the foyer of the empty church.
Skint is stalking forward so quickly she has to run to keep up.
“Skint. Skint!”
“Fuck it. Fuck it.” That bitch. That bitch. Focus, kid. Think. Calm down.
Fuck it fuck it fuck it.
“I didn’t know what you wanted me to do!”
Years of that shit.
“I thought you were going to start the shouting!”
Fuck it fuck it fuck it.
“Skint, please!”
“I can’t really think right now, Dinah.”
“Are you mad because I did a new idea instead?”
“What?”
“A new idea. Instead of what we planned.”
“Oh. No. Your idea was great.”
They are at his house.
“Skint?”
No light on.
“Skint!”
“I’ll call you later,” Skint tells her. “Good-bye, Dinah B.”
Dinah stays still outside Skint’s house. She feels like nothing, hollowed out and cold. Snowflakes fall on her hair and face, but they are old ones, falling from the evergreens, jarred loose by the wind.
