Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story

S
ometimes Beth floated. Two or three feet off the ground, and not for very long, ten seconds or so. She wasn’t aware of floating when she was actually doing it, however. She had to land and feel a glowing sensation before she realized that she had just been up in the air.

The first time it happened she was on the church steps. She looked back down the walk and knew that she had floated up it. A couple of days later she floated down the outside cellar stairs of her house. She ran inside and told her grandmother, who whipped out the pen and the little pad she carried in her skirt pocket and drew a circle with a hooked nose.

Beth looked at it. “Has Aunt Cora floated, too?” she asked.

Her grandmother nodded.

“When?”

Her grandmother held up six fingers.

“Six years ago?”

Shaking her head, her grandmother held her hand at thigh level.

“Oh,” Beth said, “when she was six.”

When Beth was six, five years ago, her mother ran off with a man down the street who wore a toupee that curled up in humid weather. Beth’s grandmother, her father’s mother, came to live with her and her father. Thirty years before that, Beth’s grandmother had had her tonsils taken out by a quack who ripped out her vocal chords and the underside of her tongue.

It was a tragedy, because she and her twin sister, Cora, had
been on the verge of stardom (or so Cora said) as a professional singing team. They had made two long-play records: “The Carlisle Sisters, Sea to Sea” and “Christmas with the Carlisle Sisters.” Beth’s grandmother liked to play the records at high volume and to mouth the words. “My prairie home is beautiful, but oh …” If Beth sang along, her grandmother might stand next to her and sway and swish her skirt as though Beth were Cora and the two of them were back on stage.

The cover of the “Sea to Sea” album had a photograph of Beth’s grandmother and Aunt Cora wearing middies and sailor hats and shielding their eyes with one hand as they peered off in different directions. Their hair, blond and billowing out from under their hats, was glamorous, but Beth secretly felt that even if her grandmother hadn’t lost her voice she and Cora would never have been big stars because they had hooked noses, what Cora called Roman noses. Beth was relieved that she hadn’t inherited their noses, although she regretted not having got their soft, wavy hair, which they both still wore long, in a braid or falling in silvery drifts down their backs. Beth’s grandmother still put on blue eye shadow and red lipstick, too, every morning. And around the house she wore her old, flashy, full-length stage skirts, faded now—red, orange or yellow, or flowered, or with swirls of broken-off sequins. Beth’s grandmother didn’t care about sloppiness or dirt. With the important exception of Beth’s father’s den, the house was a mess—Beth was just beginning to realize and be faintly ashamed of this.

On each of Beth’s grandmother’s skirts was a sewed-on pocket for her pencil and pad. Due to arthritis in her thumb she held the pencil between her middle finger and forefinger, but she still drew faster than anyone Beth had ever seen. She always drew people instead of writing out their name or their initials. Beth, for instance, was a circle with tight, curly hair. Beth’s friend Amy was an exclamation mark. If the phone rang and nobody was home, her grandmother answered it and tapped her
pencil three times on the receiver to let whoever was on the other end know that it was her and that they should leave a message. “Call,” she would write, and then do a drawing.

A drawing of a man’s hat was Beth’s father. He was a hardworking lawyer who stayed late at the office. Beth had a hazy memory of him giving her a bath once, it must have been before her mother ran off. The memory embarrassed her. She wondered if he wished that she had gone with her mother, if, in fact, she was supposed to have gone, because when he came home from work and she was still there, he seemed surprised. “Who do we have here?” he might say. He wanted peace and quiet. When Beth got rambunctious, he narrowed his eyes as though she gave off a bright, painful light.

Beth knew that he still loved her mother. In the top drawer of his dresser, in an old wallet he never used, he had a snapshot of her mother wearing only a black slip. Beth remembered that slip, and her mother’s tight black dress with the zipper down the back. And her long red fingernails that she clicked on tables. “Your mother was too young to marry,” was her father’s sole disclosure. Her grandmother disclosed nothing, pretending to be deaf if Beth asked about her mother. Beth remembered how her mother used to phone her father for money and how, if her grandmother answered and took the message, she would draw a big dollar sign and then an upside-down V sitting in the middle of a line—a witch’s hat.

A drawing of an upside-down V without a line was church. When a Presbyterian church was built within walking distance, Beth and her grandmother started going to it, and her grandmother began reading the Bible and counselling Beth by way of biblical quotations. A few months later a crosswalk appeared at the end of the street, and for several years Beth thought that it was a “Presbyterian” instead of a “Pedestrian” crosswalk and that the sign above it said Watch for Presbyterians.

Her Sunday school teacher was an old, teary-eyed woman
who started every class by singing “When Mothers of Salem,” while the children hung up their coats and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her. That hymn, specifically the part about Jesus wanting to hold children to His “bosom,” made Beth feel that there was something not right about Jesus, and consequently it was responsible for her six months of anxiety that she would end up in hell. Every night, after saying her prayers, she would spend a few minutes chanting “I love Jesus, I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” the idea being that she could talk herself into it. She didn’t expect to feel earthly love; she awaited the unknown feeling called glory.

When she began to float, she said to herself, “This is glory.”

She floated once, sometimes twice a week. Around Christmas it began to happen less often—every ten days to two weeks. Then it dwindled down to only about once a month. She started to chant “I love Jesus” again, not because she was worried any more about going to hell, she just wanted to float.

By the beginning of the summer holidays she hadn’t floated in almost seven weeks. She phoned her Aunt Cora who said that, yes, floating was glory all right, but that Beth should consider herself lucky it had happened even once. “Nothing that good lasts long,” she sighed. Beth couldn’t stop hoping, though. She went to the park and climbed a tree. Her plan was to jump and have Jesus float her to the ground. But as she stood on a limb, working up her courage, she remembered God seeing the little sparrow fall and letting it fall anyway, and she climbed down.

She felt that she had just had a close call. She lay on her back on the picnic table, gazing up in wonder at how high up she had been. It was a hot, still day. She heard heat bugs and an ambulance. Presently she went over to the swings and took a turn on each one, since there was nobody else in the park.

She was on the last swing when Helen McCormack came waddling across the lawn, calling that a boy had just been run over by a car. Beth slid off the swing. “He’s almost dead!” Helen called.

“Who?” Beth asked.

“I don’t know his name. Nobody did. He’s about eight. He’s got red hair. The car ran over his leg
and
his back.”

“Where?”

Helen was panting. “I shouldn’t have walked so fast,” she said, holding her hands on either side of her enormous head. “My cranium veins are throbbing.” Little spikes of her wispy blond hair stood out between her fingers.

“Where did it happen?” Beth said.

“On Glenmore. In front of the post office.”

Beth started running toward Glenmore, but Helen called, “There’s nothing there now, everything’s gone!” so Beth stopped and turned, and for a moment Helen and the swings seemed to continue turning, coming round and round like Helen’s voice saying, “You missed the whole thing. You missed it. You missed the whole thing.”

“He was on his bike,” Helen said, dropping onto a swing, “and an eyewitness said that the car skidded on water and knocked him down, then ran over him twice, once with a front tire and once with a back one. I got there before the ambulance. He probably won’t live. You could tell by his eyes. His eyes were glazed.” Helen’s eyes, blue, huge because of her glasses, didn’t blink.

“That’s awful,” Beth said.

“Yes, it really was,” Helen said, matter-of-factly. “He’s not the first person I’ve seen who nearly died, though. My aunt nearly drowned in the bathtub when we were staying at her house. She became a human vegetable.”

“Was the boy bleeding?” Beth asked.

“Yes, there was blood everywhere.”

Beth covered her mouth with both hands.

Helen looked thoughtful. “I think he’ll probably die,” she said. She pumped her fat legs but without enough energy to get the swing going. “I’m going to die soon,” she said.

“You are?”

“You probably know that I have water on the brain,” Helen said.

“Yes, I know that,” Beth said. Everyone knew. It was why Helen wasn’t supposed to run. It was why her head was so big.

“Well, more and more water keeps dripping in all the time, and one day there will be so much that my brain will literally drown in it.”

“Who said?”

“The doctors, who else?”

“They said, ‘You’re going to die’?”

Helen threw her an ironic look. “Not exactly. What they tell you is, you’re not going to live.” She squinted up at a plane going by. “The boy, he had … I think it was a rib, sticking out of his back.”

“Really?”

“I
think
it was a rib. It was hard to tell because of all the blood.” With the toe of her shoe, Helen began to jab a hole in the sand under her swing. “A man from the post office hosed the blood down the sewer, but some of it was already caked from the sun.”

Beth walked toward the shade of the picnic table. The air was so thick and still. Her arms and legs, cutting through it, seemed to produce a thousand soft clashes.

“The driver was an old man,” Helen said, “and he was crying uncontrollably.”

“Anybody
would
cry,” Beth said hotly. Her eyes filled with tears.

Helen squirmed off her swing and came over to the table. Grunting with effort, she climbed onto the seat across from Beth and began to roll her head. “At least
I’ll
die in one piece,” she said.

“Are you really going to?” Beth asked.

“Yep.” Helen rotated her head three times one way, then three times the other. Then she propped it up with her hands cupped under her chin.

“But can’t they do anything to stop the water dripping in?” Beth asked.

“Nope,” Helen said distantly, as if she were thinking about something more interesting.

“You know what?” Beth said, swiping at her tears. “If every night, you closed your eyes and chanted over and over ‘Water go away, water go away, water go away,’ maybe it would start to, and then your head would shrink down.”

Helen smirked. “Somehow,” she said, “I doubt it.”

From the edge of the picnic table Beth tore a long sliver of wood like the boy’s rib. She pictured the boy riding his bike no-hands, zigzagging down the street the way boys did. She imagined bursting Helen’s head with the splinter to let the water gush out.

“I’m thirsty,” Helen sighed. “I’ve had a big shock today. I’m going home for some lemonade.”

Beth went with her. It was like walking with her grandmother, who, because of arthritis in her hips, also rocked from side to side and took up the whole sidewalk. Beth asked Helen where she lived.

“I can’t talk,” Helen panted. “I’m trying to breathe.”

Beth thought that Helen lived in the apartments where the immigrants, crazy people and bums were, but Helen went past those apartments and up the hill to the new Regal Heights subdivision, which had once been a landfill site. Her house was a split-level with a little turret above the garage. On the door was an engraved wooden sign, the kind that Beth had seen nailed to posts in front of cottages. No Solicitors, it said.