My One Hundred Adventures (3 page)

“And I was getting tired of sitting. I was getting a sore bottom,” Mrs. Parks explains further now that we are headed home.

“But I thought you wanted to see your sister,” says my mother. Then she looks at Mrs. Parks and sighs and realizes what a useless thing she has said. Mrs. Parks wanted to see her sister and now she doesn't. It is as simple as that.

Mrs. Parks keeps rotating in her seat and offering us the bag of saltwater taffy. We only take one or two pieces each because she has paid for it. We have all slept but my mother, who has driven most of the night.

When we pull up at Mrs. Parks's house Mrs. Merriweather is standing in the doorway looking worried. We have forgotten even to leave a note. But she is so relieved, she is not angry, and she makes us eggs and Mrs. Parks smiles all through breakfast and says she feels much better.

As we prepare to depart through the kitchen door, Mrs. Parks gives Hershel the rest of the saltwater taffy. She has decided she doesn't like it after all, she says, but I think she is just relinquishing the last of the adventure. She is done with all that. She helps Mrs. Merriweather put the dishes in the dishwasher. She doesn't think Mrs. Merriweather is doing it right. Through the open door I see Max being bitten by one of the geese and my mother kicking it in the nose. The goose's beak bleeds. I did not know that if you kicked a goose it would bleed. It is disconcerting. The geese are so mean they look as if something else should be running through their veins, something vile and milky. Not blood like my own. I shove Maya the rest of the way out the door and we join my mother, Hershel and Max.

Mrs. Parks comes to the door again to wave goodbye and asks what has happened to the goose. She is staring at its bloody beak. My mother says she doesn't know. I don't think she is trying to cover up her action. I think she is too tired to explain.

We walk home because Mrs. Merriweather is too busy keeping an eye on Mrs. Parks's thrombosis to drive us, but the thrombosis seems so long ago and beside the point that we want to tell her it is ancient history. Mrs. Parks is cranky but content now. She has not stayed around to die. She has gone to visit her sister even if she never got there. She has gone into the night and bought snacks. She has found out she can still have adventures. But Mrs. Merriweather probably wouldn't understand this. She was busy at her sister's bringing berries. She has had another sort of day and will never know ours. Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know. I see all those millions of different days crowded into the one.

Max says he sees a whale even though we haven't reached the beach yet and cannot see the ocean. When we get past the parking lot, my mother carries Maya across the sand because she is too tired to walk and puts her to bed. But my mother does not go to bed immediately herself, even though she has not slept. The sun is just over the horizon and the waves are gently sparkling and she and I get the laundry off the line. “Look at this, Jane,” she says to me. “The clothes are all dry. They smell like the night.” She gathers them into her arms. “We didn't have a storm after all. We were spared it.” And she goes back into the house to rest a bit before seeing what the new day will bring.

Delivering Bibles by Balloon

My Third Adventure

I
t is Sunday. Nellie Phipps exhorts the congregation to pray for the speedy recovery of Mrs. Parks. We pray for the other folks in town, and then, says Nellie, we are to pray
especially
for Mrs. Nasters and her cancer. It is exactly what Mrs. Parks complained about. Why should Mrs. Nasters be given special consideration? And so I refuse to pray for Mrs. Nasters. Mrs. Parks has put me and our family firmly on her side with her underrated illness. But Nellie's sermon is about positive energy and positive thoughts and how these things affect our lives and I begin to worry about whether such closing of my heart to Mrs. Nasters's cancer will have bad effects on my adventures.

I know Nellie believes in miracles—miraculous healings, mystical events. I would like to know if these things exist too. I pray for a sign. If such things can be, then let me see a circle of purple light against the sky.

I decide to ask Nellie about these things. I also want to ask her what she thinks about my not praying for Mrs. Nasters. If that is what she means by negative energy.

At the door of the church as Nellie is shaking hands and kissing babies I grab her proffered hand and hang on to it as to a lifeline. “I have a question, Miss Phipps,” I say. “A question about energy.”

“Later, Jane Fielding,” she says. “I've got hands to shake.”

“Please, it's pressing,” I say.

“You just think it's a pressing question,” says Nellie Phipps. “Now go out and enjoy your youth. Young people don't have pressing issues.”

There is something wrong with me, then. I feel nothing but a kind of insistent pressing. As if there is an understanding I must move toward or into.

“Please,” I say.

“Be young, Jane,” she says encouragingly. She picks up one of the lilies that decorate the church and waves it from side to side. “Be like a lily. A lily. They toil not.”

She twirls it in her hand.

“Neither do they spin,” growls an old lady, squeezing by. She has been in line to shake hands and I have held her up. She gives up on shaking hands and heads grumpily down the steps instead.

“Can we talk after you're done?” I ask.

“Go! Go wait in the Sunday school room if you must,” Nellie says. “And
consider
the lilies. They have no pressing questions. They're very ding-dong positive.”

I run up the road first to ask my mother if it is okay if I come home later. She says of course it is. Sunday dinner is always in the evening at our house, as the sun sets. As if we are feasting to mark the end of another week. I know Sunday is supposed to be the beginning of the week but my mother's Sunday tranquility makes it feel as if we are putting the week to bed, pulling the covers up under its chin, blessing what has been and closing its eyes for sleep.

My mother goes off with my sister and brothers. She has much to do. Summer Sundays she spends sweeping the sand out of the cottage and changing the sheets and picking fresh flowers to go around all the rooms. I watch their innocent backs going over the crest of the hill as if I will never see them again.

I go into the Sunday school room but get shooed out by Mrs. Henderson, who is the piano teacher in town but also teaches the younger children's Sunday-school classes. She frightens me and I am glad I no longer have to return to that room with her snapping voice and heavy piano-pedal-pounding foot.

I sit on the back steps of the church by the Sunday-school room and make daisy chains from the tiny daisies growing in the church field. Finally Nellie has blessed everyone she can find, even some men stumbling out of the tavern, confusing them more than they normally are. She can no longer put off dealing with me.

“So,” she says, approaching.

I tell her my worries about deliberately not praying for Mrs. Nasters.

“It's all energy,” she says finally. “It's like illness. When people are sick, it is just their own unresolved issues affecting their energies. Do you understand what I mean?”

I nod as if I have known this all along. As if this is perfectly natural. It does make a kind of sense.

“Then Mrs. Nasters…”

“Cancer is usually caused by people's unresolved anger,” says Nellie. “Mrs. Nasters has a lot of work to do. Spiritual work.”

“Mrs. Parks's thrombosis?”

“Blocked energy. Are you interested in these things, child?”

I nod.
She
is clearly interested in them. How can I say no without being rude? But it's not this so much that I am interested in as
something,
that I want to find, or see, something that I know is there, in everything, that if I can only be good enough, or, as she believes, positive enough, I can get a clearer glimpse of.

“Well, I should take you on my healing sessions, then.”

I must look completely blank, because she explains to me that she uses her hands to move people's energies and unblock them.

“Of course, not everyone is receptive,” she says.

I would guess not. I try to imagine telling Maya or Max or Hershel, Sit still, your energy is going to be unblocked.

“Well then, come with me. I have to deliver Bibles this afternoon and I will drop in on Mrs. McCarthy. She has asked me for a healing session. Of course, she calls it
laying on of hands
because that's what the old-timers used to call it. She's in an old folks' home outside of town. We can drop in on her and spend the rest of the day delivering the Bibles in that direction, because I haven't been out that way yet.”

The missionary movement within our church sends every congregation boxes of Bibles to distribute. Every week Nellie tries to rope in anyone she can to help. But as much as people seem to like Nellie Phipps, you know what Sunday is, it's a day with a lot of potential for naps.

“I ought to ask my mother,” I say, getting into Nellie's car.

“When are you people going to get you a phone out there?” she asks as we drive to the parking lot closest to our beach.

“Oh gosh, Miss Phipps, I dunno,” I say. My mother has five mouths to feed.

“You run on, now. I don't want to get sand in my Sunday shoes,” she says. “And tell your mother you don't know if you'll be home for dinner or not. It's time-consuming to get your energies flowing again. You stopped them when you didn't pray for Mrs. Nasters but we'll release them with this positive work.”

I run over the hot sand and find my mother digging some clams for dinner. I tell her I'll be gone all day and maybe won't come home until after dinner because I am going to distribute Bibles with Nellie Phipps. At this my mother straightens up and wipes her hands on her skirt and says, “Well, how in heaven did you get yourself roped into that?”

“I don't know,” I lie. Nellie Phipps wants me to explain how I need to unblock my negative energies to let the positive energies flow and that Bible delivering is one step, but I know what will fly with my mother and what won't.

“Well, if you said you would I guess you'd better, though it's a shame to waste such a lovely day.”

“I know,” I say. “I just got stuck.”

My mother nods.

I am interested in seeing Nellie do this stuff with her hands. This sounds miraculous to me. I just don't really want to deliver Bibles. Forcing anyone to read anything doesn't sit right with me. I run back along the beach looking out to sea, praying to be distracted by whales. If I see whales, I think, it means my energy is fine and I don't have to bother with Nellie Phipps and her Bibles, but I don't see whales. I decide that this isn't conclusive. It may just mean that God isn't into the obvious.

I get in the car and Nellie and I drive right out of town, the boxes of Bibles slamming around in the back of the station wagon, which doesn't have very good springs, and so we and the Bibles bounce along the country roads, giving new meaning to the expression “Bible thumping.” I don't share this with Nellie.

We stop at the old people's home first and I trail along shyly behind Nellie. She goes right up to Mrs. McCarthy's room.

“Reverend Phipps!” says Mrs. McCarthy from her bed. She is white, her skin pale with age and illness, her hair snowy and fluffy; her sheets are white, her nightgown is white. I imagine when she dies, she just melds further into this whiteness and then disappears. There is no need to bury her. It is a very clean death.

No one pays any attention to me. They are chatting as I stand there thinking about Mrs. McCarthy's whiteness. And then, as if they have done this a thousand times, Mrs. McCarthy silently lies back on the bed and closes her eyes and Nellie moves her hands slowly and deliberately about six inches over her. She does something strange over Mrs. McCarthy's head, as if she is pulling invisible things out of it.

It takes about ten minutes and then Mrs. McCarthy sits up and smiles peacefully. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh my. That was powerful! Powerful!”

“Yes,” says Nellie. “I'll be seeing you next week, then.”

We go silently back down the stairs. I feel oddly peaceful, as if whatever Nellie was doing has affected me too.

We get into the car without a word and drive on.

Eventually this serenity fades, like bathwater seeping out a leaky drain, and I am sad that the real world and my usual feelings return and intrude. I begin to wonder if it was all in my head back there and I look at Nellie. She doesn't look so coolly serene anymore either. What happened and why didn't it last? I am too shy to ask and I'm not sure Nellie knows anyway.

We are far out of town now. Nellie says we have to drive a long way to be in a Bible-dropping territory she hasn't covered yet. I see long wild lupins and some kind of yellow wildflower I can't identify and lots of fields of cows. I wish I had a flower book with me to give these yellow flowers a name. I ask Nellie if she knows what they are. She has her hands gripped on the steering wheel and her eyes bore holes down the road as if she is clearing a way ahead for us with her laser vision, and she looks neither to left nor to right.

“What flowers? Never had much to do with flowers. Dairy country in these parts. Good ice cream.”

I am surprised that someone so in tune with the universe is not interested in its flowers but perhaps she doesn't pay attention to such trivia because she has big, important issues of good and bad energy to concentrate on. We stop at a small town to buy cones and slurp them up as we drive along. The ice cream is so full of fat it hardly drips. It's like eating a mound of flavored butter. What does melt slides down the cone in a creamy lather. This is like nothing I have eaten before and I begin to feel the stir of excitement in my rib cage of adventures to be had and I smile.

“Don't worry, child, we'll fix your bad energy,” says Nellie, and that puts an end to my contentment.

We drive for a long time without a person to hand a Bible to. Then we come upon an old farmer walking down the road with his cows. I think the cows must have broken a fence somewhere and escaped and the farmer is taking them back. Either that or he takes them for walks the way some folks walk their dogs. It would be peaceful to walk some cows. They wouldn't bark alarmingly. They would moo in celestial harmony.

I am thinking this when Nellie stops the car suddenly, jolting me, and tries to hand the farmer a Bible out the window—we have a few on my lap at the ready. But the stopping of the car causes a ruckus with the cows, who begin to scatter in a frightened way that looks like the beginning of a stampede. The farmer waves us off with an irritated look. His peaceful cow walk has been disturbed. One of the cows brings its head too close to Nellie's window and she gets in a panic and puts the car in the wrong gear, which makes an awful, loud grinding sound, which further inflames the cows who begin to race around in six directions at once with the farmer shouting and flapping his arms and cursing us. Nellie finally gets the car out of there before we are run over by cows. The sound of the farmer's curses follows us down the road.

“He should have taken the Bible,” Nellie says, panting. “Now, that's a man who could use a little positive energy.” Sweat drips off her forehead. If I'd been killed by a cow it would have been hard to explain to my mother.

We drive on silently.

“I've never been in these parts,” says Nellie after a while, breaking the comforting silence of the bubble that is our car moving through the stillness of the country afternoon.

We round a bend. I gasp. The field ahead of us looks like something out of a storybook. Giant balloons, all different, all in birthday-party colors. It is like being in someone's imagination.

“Can you see them too?” I ask, thinking maybe it is
my
imagination they are in. “Those things in the field?”

“Of course I can. They're right ding-dong there,” says Nellie, who is beginning to look hot and cranky, pulling the car over to the side of the road with a thunk. “A bunch of hot-air balloons. You know what hot-air balloons are, don't you?”

“Hot-air balloons?” I say, breathing dizzily. Why has no one ever told me?

“Well, I expect you live in ignorance a fair amount of the time,” says Nellie, sighing. “I always say to your mother that it's wrong cloistering you children like that down at the end of the beach where you're so sheltered from the world.”

I think this is a strange way to look at it. As if, if we'd moved to town, the whole of mankind and its mysteries could
then
make its way to us and we'd know about everything that is. My best friend, Ginny, lives in our town's only new development. She has houses packed all around her and I know for sure she doesn't know everything there is. I envision the world coming to us, full of its hot-air balloons and countries and peoples and cities, all piling up in a giant mess at our doorstep. We'd never sort it out and all kinds of things would get broken and lost.