the needle, blew the dust off, and cradled it between the grooves.
The needle crackled, laying down the snaps, and Billy Joel began crooning “The Longest Time.” Turned away from us, I could see Dad’s shoulders sink into the yearning, then his decision to climb up the harmony to be where we were. “Want to dance, girls?”
Meg and Mindy, full of an innocence he was being asked to farewell yet again, ran up and threw their arms around him. He waddled around the living room with a pair of little feet on each shoe. Mom came from vacuuming upstairs to watch, her eyes a thread of assurance that happiness can go on.
When Dad started slowing, Mom asked Meg and Mindy to dance with her. They ran over and she spun them in ballet twirls. Dad scooped me off the mattress. My toes bumped the wallet in his pocket. We started dancing with my legs swinging.
We could both do the yearning, though I couldn’t yet say what it was for: a voice in the hall, unwritten music, the fact of miracles and mutual need even without demonstration of their fulfillment. There was nothing I could do for him, and I knew it. But he knew it too.
Dad and I danced until the end of the song and Meg and Mindy twirled themselves dizzy. At the end, Dad set my feet back on the carpet and went to stop the spinning record. Mindy, in a smiling heap on the floor, drunk on vertigo, her cheeks and nose crimson and her eyes wide and glassy shouted, “Again!” Megan and I joined her, jumping from the floor to the mattress and back, the word bouncing and dipping with us, springs in our stomachs and throats. “a-Gain, A-gain, a-Gain, A-gain, a-gAin!” Dad bent, his knees cracking, and moved the needle back. Mom walked toward the couch and saved them both: “Why don’t you girls dance? Dad and I will watch.”
The music started and all three of us began whirling, necks stretched back, palms up, the dingy speckled ceiling flopping, mixing, swirling as we spun faster, faster. Everything shifting from liquid back to solid as we thumped to the floor, our brains smudging the room back to place.
We sped up on the bridges, the bouncing valves of the background vocals filling our ears with the sound of our eyes. Mom and Dad flopped on the couch and Dad picked up his feathered Bible to make room. This morning he’d been up before everyone and had left it on the couch where he’d done his usual reading. Billy Joel wondered about the boundaries of hope and the virtue of being too far gone to turn back.
Mom and I watched Megan and Mindy smash into each other and spring exactly backwards, two little bodies, one blonde, one brunette, flinging off each other like reflections, their bottoms planted, their feet sprawled straight out facing each other. Mom watched for the quiver of tears. They giggled and turned opposite directions to crawl back up. I looked to see Dad smile at them and caught him with one hand still on his Bible, placing it aside. The burgundy paper cover had gold letters: Serendipity Study Bible. For groups and lay leaders. I caught him lingering over it.
The voice in the air put aside consequences, declared willingness to be a fool, and told everyone listening that what happened next came of his want and his intention. Dad turned to give Mom a kiss, his eyes intent as the record spun.
On the left side of the sanctuary, on the outside edge of the light, I can see myself as a little girl sitting beside her mother. The little girl’s fingers touch the cover of a hymnal, feeling the painted red bookcloth to the edge of the embossed gold letters. The copperplate capitals have sharp cliff edges and flat smoothed valleys. Her finger settles in the valley and strokes the cool center of the t. It’s like the cross on the front wall of the room, above the sunken basin used for baptisms the children walk in dry after Sunday morning service as they jump around the stage steps and hide under the choir chairs.
The sanctuary smells like old hymnals, their edges faded to pink and daubed with inexplicable water spots, the pages cream and knit with the aroma of attics and tape. The congregation tonight is wide and shallow in the varnished pews. The ceiling is low and unspectacular, the carpet and pew cushions scratchy with yellow and green flecks. The back of the church is dark, only the front row of lights is on. In true Protestant fashion, everything here is electrical, practical: there’s no candlelight or arched stone—the dark windows are clear paned glass that opens, in the light, to let the summer breezes in for coolness more than atmosphere.
A man with white hair and glasses is talking at the front of the church, in front of a music stand, with the raised pulpit darkened behind him. The little girl knows he’s a missionary. She’s here alone with her mother, who wanted to hear the man. She’s the only child in the room, her mother like a sort of sister, the next youngest in the group of white hair, pleated skirts, and pinstriped overalls. The man speaking uses no microphone. He’s come from China and will go back there to keep working on translation.
I see the little girl listen, nested in the seat, her sitting body the same size as the angle of the pew. Two ls resting exactly in each other. The wood of the pew hurts her back, but she doesn’t fidget, she’s listening. And thinking.
The man speaks about love and protection. He uses the words ‘heaven’ and ‘Father’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘hell.’ But ‘hell’ with a sadness of loss—his voice lowers as he says it—the way people speak of a child or a friend who has not just left but cut ties and run away, not from any building or person called home, but from the place inside themselves that recognizes it.
Small as she is, the little girl can recognize this kind of hurt. It shocks me to see her see it. She thinks it sounds like birds at night. Loons and geese and the loneliness of flight in a dark sky. I know now she’ll feel it every time she finds herself in an airplane at night, moon or none, and will wonder at how very close it is to peace, how there could be such a small distance between the deepest kind of good and the unbottomed hollow.
Though she doesn’t think this in the church pew, she senses the feather of dark around the back of the sanctuary and the black pressed hard on the window glass. She knows there are two kinds of boundaries—not just between right and wrong—but in all reasons why. She wants them all to be window panes, solid and clear, with the simplicity of being either outside or in. She wants love to be recognizable by noise, to buzz or hum, or duty to give off a smell, like clean porcelain sinks or animals. She wants to know who loves her.
In the church, the white-haired man asks if anyone would like to come to the front. This is an action, a clear separation as easy to read as a window being open or closed. The little girl is scared of hell, but mostly she craves the clarity, somehow wants her body to mark an absolute. She turns to her mother and says, quietly, “I want to go up there.”
The mother’s heart turns over in her chest. She takes the little girl by the hand and they walk up the side aisle, up the stage steps and into a shadowed corner. There’s a shuffling at the front of the church as someone goes to find something: they weren’t expecting children. The white-haired man talks to the little girl. He has glasses and a square sort of face with baggy cheeks like a grandfather who always has a book. Someone brings a small pamphlet, the best they could do: a tract with cartoon people drawn in it. The little girl looks at the people in the pamphlet in their balloony red and blue clothes and at the black-lettered words around them. She smells the flat walked-on carpet.
She listens, and she thinks.
She’s heard people talk about what it feels like to do this: light, like the moment at the top arc of a pushed swing. She wonders if doing it will help her see why there are storms. Or why Dad brings flowers or stops for signs—because he wants to or because he should. It’s important to her to know which.
The little girl breathes through her nose and feels the man’s warm hand on her small shoulder. After he finishes talking, she wraps her fingers around each other, closes her eyes and tilts her head. She doesn’t feel anything, no swinging, or hear anything, not a hum, so she figures
