THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES
DEESHA PHILYAW
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
MORGANTOWN
Copyright © 2020 by Deesha Philyaw
All rights reserved
First edition published 2020 by West Virginia University Press
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN
Paper 978-1-949199-73-4
Ebook 978-1-949199-74-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Philyaw, Deesha, author.
Title: The secret lives of church ladies / Deesha Philyaw.
Description: First edition. | Morgantown : West Virginia University Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008805 | ISBN 9781949199734 (paperback) | ISBN 9781949199741 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3616.H479 A6 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008805
Cover design by Stewart Williams.
Cover photo by Sewn Apart on Unsplash.
Book design by Than Saffel / WVU Press.
Stories in this collection appeared in slightly different form in the following publications:
“Eula,” Apogee Journal, no. 9, Summer 2017; “Not Daniel,” Cheat River Review, issue 10, Spring/Summer 2018; “Snowfall,” Baltimore Review, Winter 2019; “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” Barrelhouse, Special Issue: I’ve Got Love on My Mind: Black Women on Love, February 2020.
Ansel Elkins, excerpt from “Autobiography of Eve” from Blue Yodel. Copyright © 2015 by Ansel Elkins. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
For Taylor and Peyton,
And for everyone trying to get free
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
—Ansel Elkins,
“Autobiography of Eve”
CONTENTS
EULA
NOT-DANIEL
DEAR SISTER
PEACH COBBLER
SNOWFALL
HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A PHYSICIST
JAEL
INSTRUCTIONS FOR MARRIED CHRISTIAN HUSBANDS
WHEN EDDIE LEVERT COMES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EULA
EULA BOOKS the suite in Clarksville, two towns over. I bring the food. This year it’s sushi for me and cold cuts and potato salad for her. Nothing heavy. Just enough to sustain us. And I bring the champagne. This year, which like every year could be our last, I bring three bottles of André Spumante.
And I got us some noisemakers and year 2000 glasses to wear. The lenses are the two zeroes in the middle. For all we know, the Y2K bug will have us sitting in the dark one second after Dick Clark counts down in Times Square. But that’s all right with me. Because that André sips just as well in the dark.
After we settle in, Eula digs into the potato salad and cold cuts. She’s real particular about what she eats. About most things really. She likes things just so. She’s a schoolteacher, like me, so we have to mind the details, though Eula minds them more closely than I do. But she can’t tell I bought the potato salad from Publix, added some chopped boiled egg, mustard, pickle relish, and paprika, and put it in my red Tupperware bowl. She eats seconds, pats her belly, and tells me I outdid myself.
After we’re finished eating and polishing off a bottle of the André, I start the shower. We like it boiling hot. The heat relaxes me, but I feel like it does something else for Eula. She stays in there long after I get out. Through the steamy shower door, I see her pink shower cap. Her head is bowed, and I wonder if she’s asking God’s forgiveness for stepping outside of His favor as she continues to wait on His provision.
By the time Eula and I turned thirty, ten years ago, we had been best friends for half our lives. We met in tenth grade, the only Black girls in our Honors English class. Eula had been new that year; her family moved down from North Carolina. She needed a friend, and I did too. We were daydreamers, planning our double Hawaiian wedding in the margins of our math notebooks. Our husbands would be railroad men like our fathers. We’d teach at the high school, join the Ladies Auxiliary at church, and be next-door neighbors. Our kids would play together.
But our thirtieth birthdays found us teaching at the high school and serving in the Ladies Auxiliary with no other parts of our daydreams realized. We celebrated Eula’s birthday in her apartment, with too many wine coolers. She ended up in my lap, her skirt bunched up around her waist. I saw the white cotton panties between her thick brown thighs. She smelled like vanilla.
“Do you ever feel like you could just bust?” she asked me, her breath fruity and hot in my face.
I didn’t answer, afraid that my honesty would send Eula running. But it didn’t matter because she kept talking, begging me to touch her because no one had ever touched her down there. She had been a good girl, she told me. But I already knew that. As a teen, Eula hadn’t sneaked behind her parents’ backs as I had, curious, then disappointed, by what too-rough boys had to offer. And as a grown woman, she had not endured short-lived flings with men whose names weren’t worth remembering, as I had. Eula had committed to praying and waiting for her Boaz, like Ruth in the Bible.
Eula is a true believer. She doesn’t walk around with questions lingering in her throat like I do.
But that night, she slid my fingers inside those white cotton panties and forgot all about Boaz. We stayed up until we were slick with sweat. Later that morning, Eula tamped down regret with silence and coffee.
A month or so later, it was New Year’s Eve, and Eula called to say that she’d booked a suite over in Clarksville. I brought white pizza and three bottles of Asti Spumante.
For Eula’s birthday the next year, I planned a special dinner at my house for us. I went down to the fish market on Avery and got everything to make gumbo, her favorite dish. Eula liked my Grandma Pauline’s gumbo, but without the okra, so that’s how I made it. I cooked the night before Eula’s birthday because Grandma always said the gumbo tasted better after it had a chance to sit in the Frigidaire for a day.
As I stirred the roux, which is my least favorite part of making gumbo because it requires patience, Eula called to ask if she could get a rain check on dinner. Reese, an attorney from our singles Bible study whom she’d been seeing for barely six months, wanted to take her out for her birthday. It was a surprise. Her words tumbled all over each other—OhCarolettaIthinkhemightaskmetomarryhim—and I just kept stirring that roux.
“You understand, right?” Eula had asked.
“Sure.” I tried to think of something else to say that Eula would want to hear that wouldn’t taste wounded and bitter in my mouth. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It didn’t matter anyway because Eula just prattled on, wondering how Reese could’ve managed to guess her ring size and what she would say to feign surprise when he popped the question.
In the end, both Eula and Reese got a surprise that night. Their romantic dinner at a rooftop restaurant (the original surprise) was interrupted by Reese’s estranged wife.
Later, when Eula called to tell me what had happened, her fury just about leaped through the phone. I sat up in bed, listening, eating my second bowl of gumbo—with okra—another woman’s husband snoring lightly beside me.
Over time, Eula had other Reeses, other almosts. But she would end up dismissing them as too old or too young. Too broke or too stupid. Or they would dismiss her once they realized they couldn’t woo or pressure her into sleeping with them. Now’days, there are fewer and fewer Reeses, and they are less and less like Boaz with each passing year.
Sometimes I wonder if Eula finds fault with all these men because
secretly she doesn’t want any of them, and is just doing what’s expected of her.
But these are the kinds of things Eula and I don’t talk about.
After the shower, Eula puts on a white T-shirt and white cotton panties. She falls back on the king-size bed, floating on the crisp white sheets, plump pillows, and billowy comforter. Her hair is wrapped in a pink silk scarf. She takes a long drink, straight from the second bottle of André.
“Want some?” She holds the bottle out to me.
I crawl to her, from the foot of the bed. When I am next to her, she lifts the bottle to my mouth and then pours it down the front of my nightgown and giggles. “Let me get that,” she says. She sets the bottle on the nightstand and pushes me back on the pillows. She straddles me, takes off my nightgown, and licks everywhere the champagne has touched.
About an hour later, I wake up, still drunk. Eula is up, drinking from the last bottle of André. She has muted the TV, but I can tell Dick Clark is introducing some little white girl with multicolored hair who had a hit early last year. Can’t remember that child’s name, and I guess it really doesn’t matter. She can’t dance to save her life and can’t sing a lick.
“I have a New Year’s resolution,” Eula says, her eyes half-closed. “If I’m still alone come Valentine’s Day, it will be the last one I spend without a man who belongs to me and me only.”
“That’s a pretty big resolution,” I say, reaching for the bottle. The sting of her saying she’s alone doesn’t roll off of me as quickly as it usually does. “What do you plan to do?”
“Like Pastor says: the Lord can’t steer a parked car. I need to position myself to meet someone and prepare a place in my life for a husband.”
“Meaning?”
“For starters, I been slacking off on going to Bible study. If I want a godly man, I need to be in the right places.”
“You met Reese at Bible study . . .”
Eula rolls her eyes. “And I’m going to redecorate my house,” she continues. “There’s no room for a man, the way it is now. I want to make space for a husband.”
“Sorta like feng shui.”
“Feng what?”
“Never mind.” I think about Eula being busy with all these man-finding activities while I do what? Entertain the occasional married boyfriend? Spend next New Year’s Eve without her? I want a change too, but I have no plan.
“And I’m going to join the singles softball team at church,” Eula says.
“You don’t even like sports,” I say, laughing.
“Laugh all you want.” Eula adjusts the pillows behind her back. “But you need to get with the program too. Caroletta, don’t you want someone to come home to? Someone to spend your life with? Don’t you want to be happy?”
I look at Eula, her no-longer-fresh ringlets damp from the time spent between my legs. As I think about her question, something both cruel and pitiful churns inside me and threatens to spill out. Since when does she know or care anything about my happiness? Anything at all about it?
“I am happy,” I say, coaxing my voice out to sound braver than I actually feel. “Right now. Right here. With you. And it doesn’t have to be just this one night. We could—”
“Caroletta, I hope you haven’t given up on finding you a husband. I’m on a mission, and you can be too.” Eula sounds flat, like the world’s most exhausted saleslady. She scoots away from me to the edge of the bed, looking at the TV.
“Eula, turn around and look at me. Please.”
Eula shakes her head. To the TV, she says, “I don’t want to die a virgin. Do you want to die a virgin?”
I guess I wait a beat too long to respond.
Eula whips around to face me. “You . . . aren’t?”
I don’t know what’s funnier: that Eula thinks my forty-year-old ass hasn’t had sex with a man in all these many years, or that she still considers us both virgins after all we’ve done together in those same years.
“Eula.”
“You? With some dirty-ass man?” Eula clamps her hand over her mouth. In that moment, Sunday School Teacher Eula snatches the reins from Biology Teacher Eula. “You aren’t clean?”
“Eula!”
I expect her to grab her clothes and bolt. But she doesn’t. She just sits on the bed, her body racked by sobs. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she cries over and over again. I’m not even sure what it is. Me with men? Her with me? Life?
“Eula, what way was it supposed to be?”
She turns around and faces me. “I just want to be happy,” she sobs. “And normal.”
I want to close the gap between us, pull her to me and rock her until the tears stop, promise that everything will be okay, but I don’t dare. I can’t make everything okay, not the way she wants it.
“Normal according to who, Eula? Men who been dead for thousands of years? Who thought slavery was cool and treated women like property?”
“The Bible is the inerrant word of God,” Eula whispers, as defiantly as a whisper can be.
“And you only believe that because of how another group of men interpret the first group of men. People say you’re supposed to put your faith in God, not men. Do you think God wants you, or anybody, to go untouched for decades and decades? For their whole lives? Like Sister Stewart, Sister Wilson, Sister Hill, my mother after my father died—all those women at church who think they have to choose between pleasing God and something so basic, so human as being held and known in the most intimate way. If God became human once—”
“If?” Eula says, spitting out the word.
“—then why would he make rules that force such a painful choice?”
“I don’t question God.”
“But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it’s not doing you any favors.”
Eula narrows her eyes at me. “You’re not who I thought you were.”
“You’re not who you thought you were either.”
On the TV, the Times Square crowd is going wild. It’s almost time for the countdown. Eula and I are lying in the bed wearing only our year 2000 glasses. The noisemakers are still in the bag.
“I want to ring in the New Year in Times Square someday,” Eula says, but her words are kind of mashed up because of the André.
“With me? Maybe we could go next year, instead of coming here.”
Eula doesn’t answer.
“Our friends down under in Sydney, Australia, were the first to ring in the New Year,” Dick Clark says to a white woman in the crowd wearing a purple velvet Mad Hatter’s hat. “And other countries have celebrated as well without any loss of power or computer glitches. Do you think the Y2K bug was much ado about nothing?”
“I’m scared, Caroletta.”
“I know.”
Eula begins to whisper. I move closer to hear what she’s saying and realize that she’s praying.
When she says amen, I get up and walk to the foot of the bed and kneel down. Eula’s toenails are painted the same pink as her scarf. I reach for her ankles and pull her toward me. She scoots on her butt until she’s at the edge, her feet flat on the bed on either side of me. She spreads her knees apart. I push down gently on the inside of her thighs, until she is open, like an altar.
10-9-8 . . .
I am speaking in tongues.
4-3-2 . . .
Eula has her prayers and I have mine.
NOT-DANIEL
I PARKED in the shadows behind the hospice center, and waited. I held a box of condoms on my lap, Magnum XLs. It was like being sixteen again, except this time I bought the condoms instead of relying on the boy. This time the boy was a man I had mistaken for someone I’d gone to junior high with when our paths first crossed two weeks before at the main entrance of the hospice center. I was coming, he was going. I thought he was Daniel McMurray so I stared longer than I should have, and he stared back. Later that evening, I’d run into him again coming out of the room across from my mother’s. His mother had b
reast cancer, mine ovarian.
I checked my phone. 10:27. I’d timed the Walmart run for the condoms pretty well. Not-Daniel would be down in three minutes. To throw Nurse Irie, the night nurse, off the trail, we never left or returned to the floor at the same time. Her name wasn’t really Irie, but I called her that behind her back because she was Jamaican. She was also mean as a snake. I had complained to the head of the center about her, suggesting that her brusque manner was better suited for the morgue. But Nurse Irie liked Not-Daniel. She didn’t cop an attitude when he asked questions about his mother’s care. He told me she even joked with him late one night as he walked around the floor in his skimpy running shorts: “Boi, you keep walking around here in those itty bitty tings, someone might mess around and give you a sponge bath.”
Nurse Irie was not a stupid woman. Perhaps she would put two and two together and figure out that Not-Daniel and I were . . . what were we? What do you call it when your mothers are hospice neighbors and the nights are endless and sleepless and here’s someone else who spent the day talking to insurance companies and creditors and banks and pastors and relatives and friends, some more well-intentioned than others? Someone else who is the dutiful son to your dutiful daughter, another family’s chief shit handler, bail bondsman, maid, chauffeur, therapist, career advisor, ATM. Here’s someone else who both welcomes and dreads death as it loiters in the wings, an unpredictable actor.
What do you call it when that someone else wears a wedding band but never mentions his wife by name? A wife and two kids back home in the next state over. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
At exactly ten thirty, Not-Daniel tapped the passenger-side window. For a few moments, we sat in silence the way we always did at first. Sometimes I would cry, sometimes he would too, because we could out here, beyond the reach of our mothers’ Jesus, nurses on autopilot, empty platitudes, and garbage theology about God’s will disguised as comfort. And then eventually, one of us would speak.
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