The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [35]
I closed my eyes for an instant, remembering. As a child, I had come here twice a week, for choir practice and for the slow Sunday service. Blake and I sat fidgeting in the pews, passing notes and drawings on the backs of the offering envelopes, our parents casting disapproving glances. I remembered the standing and the rising and the kneeling, the prayers spoken in unison, the same each week, and then the silent prayers, more mysterious, when I knelt self-consciously, aware of the breathing all around. In those days God seemed as silent as my father, as disapproving as my uncle, as distant as the portrait of my great-grandfather in the hall; when I closed my eyes, those were the gazes I felt, and I was always nervous. Still, at eight, ten, twelve, I did my best, praying for the usual things: grades, crushes, the baby chickadee fallen from its nest, its tiny life trembling in my palm. In seventh grade, alarmed about pollution, I prayed hard for the rivers and the lakes.
Yet even though the stories all seemed to exclude me—in my childhood, the only formal place for a woman in this church was helping with the altar cloths or singing in the choir—I was still drawn to something here I couldn’t name, the deep silence, perhaps, or the sense of mystery the silence evoked. Even as a teenager, riding wild with Keegan Fall, I still went to church. When the church rules finally changed—it had been a controversy, a bitter decades-long fight—I was among the first girls to become an acolyte. I remembered slipping into the white cotton robe falling in smooth folds to my ankles, tying the rope belt around my waist, lifting the heavy brass cross and leading the choir slowly down the central aisle. I felt both happy and defiant, my hair cut short that last spring I was home, wearing cutoff jeans beneath the flowing robes.
Then my father drowned. I sat in the usual pew during his funeral, his casket in front, piled with flowers.
Grant us grace to entrust thy servant, Martin.... We filed up for communion, one by one, the church echoing with the sound of our shuffling steps, the muffled coughs and cleared throats. We knelt together at the railing, my mother on one side and Blake on the other, and in the pause between the wafer and the wine I listened to their soft breathing, my sadness and longing so great I imagined it would split me open. The priest moved behind the wooden railing, offering the wafers and then the chalice, lip to lip. The Body of Christ, the Cup of Salvation. I didn’t believe that literally, it made no logical sense, and yet nonetheless I had often felt a sense of mystery, of longing and longing answered, in this ritual, this place.
So I waited, kneeling between my mother with her red-rimmed eyes, her silver hair pulled severely back, and Blake in his suit grown a few millimeters too short on the sleeves. I waited, but when I stood up, the wine both sweet and bitter in my mouth, and walked through the narrow corridor around the organ and back to the sanctuary, I did not feel healed of my grief. Nor did the world appear transformed. I paused at the front of the church and looked at the rows of pews, full of familiar faces, among them my cousin Joey and Uncle Art, his wife Austen holding Zoe on her lap, everyone dressed in black, some weeping or wiping their eyes. The same people were wealthy, the boat owners and the business owners who had depended on my father to open their locks, to reveal their secrets and their treasures. And the same people were poor. They had the same dreams and secrets and losses and frustrations. My father was gone, forever gone, but in a few minutes we would all step back into our lives, and the day-to-day would close over his absence as seamlessly as water over a rock.
Lucy, my mother whispered, slipping her arm through mine. Lucy, honey. She