The Whole Beautiful World

by Melissa Kuipers

  “Do you ever get afraid of hell?” I asked Jamie. We went to different churches, and her pastor was a slight man. I couldn’t imagine he had the strength to pound the pulpit the way Reverend Thomas did.

  “No—why would I?”

  “I don’t know.” I started to feel a little hot.

  “Well, for other people, maybe,” she said. She drew a card and read it out loud. “‘Take your family on furlough’—ah, I hate furlough.” She dragged her pawn to the corner where it was to sit until she rolled doubles to get herself an invisible plane ticket back to the mission field. “I mean, some of my friends from school and stuff—they aren’t Christians, so yeah, that kinda sucks. But I know I’m saved, so . . . Are you gonna go?”

  “Where? Oh.” I jiggled the dice in my cupped hands, blew on them, and tossed them down.

  “You’re saved, right?” she asked me as I pushed my pawn four spaces through deepest, darkest Africa. I purchased a couple of huts and placed them in Zambia and Nigeria. “Sure. What do you mean?”

  She tilted her chin down seriously to look at me. “You accepted Jesus into your heart, right?”

  “Well, sure. He’s there.”

  “How do you know? When did you ask him in?”

  “I don’t know. I just, I guess I try to do the right thing and pray, and stuff.”

  “Oh,” she said, leaning back a little. She put her hand on the edge of the board slowly, indicating the game was on hold. “If you don’t even know the day, you probably haven’t done it.”

  “But, I believe it all—I pray before all my meals and before I go to sleep—”

  “That doesn’t really matter if you haven’t let Jesus open the door of your heart.” Her tone had suddenly changed. She was speaking with a voice I had never heard her use before. “You might pray and stuff, but how can Jesus hear you if he’s not in there?” She spoke slowly and sadly, the way Reverend Thomas spoke when he wasn’t being angry.

  And it made sense. I was sweating now and hoped she couldn’t see it forming along my forehead. I had always thought God was everywhere, reading everyone’s thoughts, seeing if they were hateful or angry or lustful or greedy. But it struck me that if I hadn’t invited him in, God wouldn’t care what I was thinking or asking of him.

  She sat there looking at me for a while from the top of her eye sockets, her lids hidden. I looked uncomfortably back and forth from her face to her hand on the board. Our two lone missionaries stood forlorn in the broad purple field of spiritual emptiness.

  “Well,” she finally said, “are you ready to make that decision?”

  “To . . .” I wasn’t sure what answer she was looking for.

  “To give your heart to Christ? I mean, Felicia, I know you’re a good girl. But that’s not enough to get you into heaven.”

  I knew I should do it, but there was something holding me back. If this was the missing piece, what would happen if tonight I went to bed and still couldn’t sleep?

  “Once,” I started, “when we were playing outside, I stepped on a dead cow—”

  “That’s not important right now, Felicia. Satan is bringing other thoughts into your head to distract you. You ready to do this?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Okay—give me your hand.” She reached across the open purple field, the five hundred bright bucks in the centre. I tried to subtly wipe my clammy palm across my leg as I brought it to meet hers hovering above the board. She fastened her eyes shut. “Dear Jesus, we know the wages of sin is death. But you died so that we could live forever.” She squeezed my hand. “Now repeat after me. Jesus, I give you my life.”

  “Jesus, I give you my life.”

  “Forgive my sins.”

  “Forgive my sins.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  I pulled my eyes open quickly, waiting for the weight of fear I’d felt across my chest to lift. She smiled at me. “Now I know we’ll be in heaven together forever!”

  She quickly leaned across the board to wrap her arms around me, scattering dice, pawns and multicoloured bills to all corners of the two-dimensional world.

  “HEY, MOM,” I said the next morning while waiting for my pancakes, swinging my legs quickly and kicking the leg of the table. “I got saved.”

  “Oh—from what?” she said, twisting at the waist to face me, spatula poised expectantly in the air.

  “You know—hell.” I felt like I had sworn. Suddenly the revelation of the term washed over me—we were all in one of two camps, me and everyone else in the world, from my family and classmates to the vague tribes in the Missionary Game.

  She watched me as if waiting for me to say more, black plastic flipper in hand. “Yes. Yes you are.” Her mouth became very small. “That’s really . . . really quite wonderful! Isn’t it?” Her eyebrows relaxed and her mouth drew into a tight smile.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She turned back to the stove and scraped the spatula along the bottom of the cast-iron pan. The sound made me feel a little sick.

  THE STRESS OF hell lifted slowly as the day went on. But during the night the cow came back, still dead and decomposing, but walking against a purple sky and carrying Reverend Thomas. He looked down at me from his seat on the cow and shook his head with tender sadness.

  “Still saved?” he asked, eyebrows raised hopefully, doubtfully.

  “I . . . I think so.”

  “Think, or know?” he said deeply.

  “Oh . . . know!” I sat up in bed. “Yes—I said the prayer that makes it for sure.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh—just the other day.”

  He rolled his eyes and the cow scraped her hoof along the dry dirt, making the same sound as the spatula on the pan.

  “Just remember,” he said in the throaty voice he used to draw out important words, “to stay that way.” The Jersey looked at me from her hollow eye sockets, deeply concerned. Reverend Thomas wrapped his fingers around the cow’s naked ribs, poking through holes in her hide. He kicked her sides with his heels and chunks of fur and flesh fell away. They turned and galloped into the incoming cloud of flies.

  “Stay what way?” I hollered.

  “Saved!” he shouted, and it echoed off the backs of the silent flies.

  “DO YOU REMEMBER what time I was saved at?” I asked Jamie the next day as we paced the circumference of the schoolyard. I knew that dream–Reverend Thomas was going a little overboard, and couldn’t imagine God would ask me on Judgment Day while the heavenly projector showed footage of all the awful things I’d ever done or thought. But I thought it might be nice to know, so I could give the man an answer the next time he showed up.

  “We should have looked at the clock!” she said. “Well, you came over for lunch, and we were on our second game, so it must have been two-ish, I think?”

  “Think or know?” I asked her under my breath. She had been the one leading the prayer so it was her responsibility to remember.

  “So are you happier now?” she asked, squeezing my elbow. “Do you feel different?”

  I didn’t have the heart to answer truthfully. “I think I do, actually.”

  She grinned, and I felt a little resentful about being another star in her crown. “Nothing more wonderful than one more soul in heaven, right?” She had put on the strange voice again.

  “But what if I don’t feel it?” I asked.

  MOTHER-OF-THE-BRIDE DRESS

  EVELYN WAS NOT IMPRESSED THAT the yellow dress she was wearing matched the grocery store sign to a T. She stood outside in the sun for a few moments looking up at it, deciding whether to go in while people manoeuvred yellow carts around her.

  No, she would not let this deter her shopping. Yellow was a good Sunday afternoon colour, she thought as she walked in and saw yellow stands, yellow walls, yellow everywhere. Yellow was plenty dignified and she wasn’t about to let this low-end chain get the better of it.

  Her skirt swooshed around her as she walked with a
basket propped on a large hip—a hip that had accomplished a great deal, that had brought two successful children into the world, that demonstrated she was more than content in her marriage. “Skinny women are the ones who are prepping the bait for their next fishing trip,” she said to friends from time to time.

  She used to be slim, back when it counted, slimmer even than her daughter Marianne, who upon getting engaged had asked her mother for her wedding dress, and Evelyn had brought it down from the attic reverently, draped across her arms like the Madonna holding Christ in the Pietà. However, when Marianne came out from the bathroom grasping the layers of lace and chiffon around her, saying, “Can you help me get into this thing?” Evelyn had smiled to herself, knowing that for all her dieting Marianne would never wear her mother’s wedding dress.

  “Oh, what a shame!” Evelyn said, lackadaisically tugging at the zipper. “It just won’t do up. I was just so slender, I suppose.”

  Marianne kept pestering her mother to go for a shopping trip for “some much needed mother-daughter bonding time” to find a mother-of-the-bride dress, even though Marianne had bought her bridal gown without her mother present, and hadn’t consulted her at all in the process. Marianne seemed to fear her mother would wear something that wouldn’t look good in the pictures.

  “Expectations for the mother of the bride are different today, Mom,” Marianne said, and then waited for Evelyn to ask, “How so, dear?” but Evelyn refused to play games. Yesterday Marianne had done engagement photos. One could hardly make a decision anymore without it being grounds for a photo shoot! When Marianne swung by afterwards to have a pot of tea and refuse cake, she exclaimed that she had learned “some amazing tips on posing for pictures. You wouldn’t believe what a difference they make! I can teach you.”

  “I don’t need lessons on how to put myself on display,” said Evelyn. “I’ve run out of things to flaunt, and I’m quite comfortable just being me in my photos.”

  “It’s not about being someone else,” Marianne said. “It’s about knowing how to bring out your best self. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good.”

  Evelyn made her way up and down the aisles picking up berries, salmon, a rich cake for a treat, till she had to limp a little to support the weight of the basket. She bent down for a jar of pickled beets when a pair of lovely high heels caught her eyes, the kind she would have worn when she was young, but couldn’t be bothered with now that she had nothing to prove. She followed the lines of the heels up the denim-clad calves to two perfectly rounded buttocks.

  She knelt there for a bit, jar in the air, staring at this sculpted bum, like a button-cap mushroom, until it floated away down the aisle. Evelyn’s basket was full and so she followed the bum into a queue before the cash. It was one of the longer lines—the bum had obviously made a poor choice.

  Evelyn once wore such a bum. She had felt men’s eyes glued to it as she walked by. But now her bottom hung in a sort of bewildered way, unsure of itself and so with every step she took it jiggled uncertainly. Wallace still grabbed at it from time to time, but she knew it was only to make her feel better. The pity of the whole display made her so uncomfortable that she would swat his hand away, saying, “Wallace, please. Don’t be so silly.”

  When she and Wallace were first together, he’d kiss her everywhere they went, without shame. If they had been standing here in this same grocery store twenty-five years ago, he in his plaid cotton pants and she in slacks with a zipper up the hip and high heels, he would have kissed her right here, on the neck even! “Wallace, please,” she would have said. And then when no one was looking, she would have grabbed his firm plaid arse.

  So entranced in this imagined memory was she that she did not realize she was leaning forward and stretching her free hand out to cup the gently faded jeans before her. She grazed the memory of her own shape with her hand, the figure firm and forgiving of who she had become.

  The young woman turned around abruptly, with a frightened look, pulling her bum from Evelyn’s soft touch. She pinned her eyes directly onto Evelyn’s.

  “Whoops!” said Evelyn, withdrawing her hand, and the girl turned back around and shuffled forward. “Whoops!” said Evelyn again for good measure, and reached for the magazine nearest where the bum had been. She had no interest in this tabloid—“Pope’s Secret Child is Russian Prostitute!” the headline declared—but it was preferable to having to look at the girl again.

  She stood there until the clerk mumbled could he help the next person in line please. She raised her eyes from the magazine to see the little blue bum prance out of the yellow store.

  As she stepped out into the sharp sunlight, two yellow bags hanging from each arm against her imposing yellow hips, she stopped for a minute to let her eyes adjust lest she walk out into the parking lot and be struck by a car, leaving an undignified mess of yellow and berries and broken eggs everywhere.

  Evelyn could picture herself there, howling at the sun while people gathered around to help her, the girl with the tight butt returned and feeling guilty now for that judgmental look she had given this woman who wanted only for a moment to remember what it was like to be squeezed and appreciated. There was something gratifying about the image of her lying there publicly howling, throwing dignity against the pavement, crying for all those things in life that were wearing and tearing in ways she in her heels and skinny wedding dress could never have expected.

  She opened her eyes where she stood along the grocery store curb, and saw two warm smiles coming towards her. She recognized one to be that of the Pentecostal minister, though she had never met him. He had played Scrooge in the town’s production of A Christmas Carol, and so convincing a converted Ebenezer was he that she considered attending the church just to see him prance around with reborn delight. She imagined him on a Sunday morning, romping around the stage as the Pentecostals do, saying, “I’m as light as a feather, I’m as happy as an angel, I’m as merry as a school-boy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”

  She remembered now that he was the minister Marianne had hired to officiate the wedding. No one in the family had much interest in church, but Marianne must have shopped around and chosen him simply because he was dynamic and gregarious. Everything, even the wedding ceremony, needed to be a good show.

  The pastor stopped before Evelyn and gave her a quick up and down look with his eyes. “My, aren’t you just a lovely sight to run into on an afternoon like this!” he said, hands on his hips. Right there beside his wife!

  “What a beautiful spring dress. Here stands a woman who radiates light for those around her!” He stood there and looked right into her eyes. She tried to smile, though the sun was making her squint in a way that might be mistaken for annoyance.

  “Oh, that’s kind to say,” she replied. She wanted to take her bags and leave this undignified display, but couldn’t seem to pull her feet away.

  “Yes, it’s clear you are a woman who brings delight to those around her,” he said. And he nodded like a hen to show her he most certainly meant it.

  “Oh, well, it’s a good spring colour,” she said shyly. “One can’t help but look good in it.” She looked to his wife. The wife smiled and nodded, not the least bit uncomfortable with the scene.

  “Well, keep it up, sister!” said the pastor. And then he and the wife slipped past her and she was moving towards her car, flowing along in glowing yellow.

  Evelyn came home and loaded her groceries into the fridge, humming as she did. She heard Wallace’s plodding footsteps along the floor and bent over with flourish to deposit strawberries in the crisper drawer. She stayed like that awhile, basking in the cool air and bright fridge light. She took one of the fresh, cute little berries right from the carton and put it straight into her mouth—unwashed!—swaying her bum back and forth as she meditated on the rich sweetness spreading across her tongue.

  Wallace whistled deeply. Evelyn thought to turn and glare at him, but instead smiled into the coolness of the fridge until he came up behind
her and gave her a solid grope with two hands.

  EVELYN SIGHED DEEPLY as Wallace ran his hand along her puckered hips. She looked up at the sunbeams streaming across the ceiling and then over at the yellow dress sprawled across the chair in the corner. It had been at least half a year since she and Wallace had made love, and she couldn’t remember the last time they had done it in the afternoon—certainly not since before the children had been born.

  Now she got up and, remaining naked, put the dress on a hanger and began to sort through dresses in the closet. “I think I’ll go to church this evening, Wallace.” She pulled out a dress. “What do you think of this one?”

  “Oh, it’s quite nice,” said Wallace, running his hand through his grey chest hair in self-congratulation.

  “Or this one?”

  “You look great in anything, dear. And even better without anything.” He chuckled to himself.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to church naked!” Although the pastor might like that. Evelyn pulled the closet door closed with enough heft to make her bum respond with a jiggle.

  THAT EVENING EVELYN walked into the Pentecostal church, Wallace in tow and still grinning. A cheerful young man greeted them at the door and handed them a pamphlet that read, SERMON SERIES: BE YOUR BEST SELF, THE SELF YOU WERE CREATED TO BE.

  A young woman with blond highlights like Marianne’s and sparkling eyes took the stage, welcomed everyone to the service on this very fine evening. She looked directly at Evelyn and smiled appreciatively. Something about her smile reminded Evelyn of Marianne in a way that made her twinge inside. She saw Marianne smile so seldom.

  The woman began to sing a solo in a lovely honey voice. Her eyes were closed and her arm went above her head, then to her heart, then cupped the air in front of her. People around Evelyn hummed along, said “Amen” at the end of each line in the song.