The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 4


Blue Throbbing Fullness





If it was Jed’s birthday looming, everything would be different. Weeks in advance, his brow creased with anxiety, he’d want to talk through all the details with me, explaining what he wanted and what he didn’t want, which of his tiny circle of friends should be invited and which shouldn’t. He’d have a list of presents for my consideration, mostly arcane widgets for his computer that can only be ordered online. There is never any chance of Jed’s birthday slipping past us. He wouldn’t let that happen.

By contrast Eli seems so laid back that, on the way to church, I feel the need to remind him.

“Don’t forget what’s happening next week.”

In the backseat of the van, he looks up from his iPod screen. An absent smile forms on his lips. “Ha, ha.”

I’m driving the boys—or rather, Jed drives while I ride shotgun. Rick always leaves first thing in the morning, meeting with the staff for prayer and then helping with the 8:00 a.m. service. This morning he asked me not to say anything about his plans for October, worrying that if the men of the church knew he was still in town, they would expect him to show up for handball and midweek Bible studies and hot wings at the sports bar. “Are you at least going to tell the boys?” I had asked. He said it would probably be better coming from me.

“Before we go in,” I say, “there’s something you need to know . . .”

As I explain, I try to gauge their separate reactions. Jed flares up immediately, while Eli seems to shrug off the unpleasant news. I know better, though. Like whisky in a sauce, Jed’s wrath will burn away quick enough. In the long run, Eli will take it harder.

“So no beach,” he says. “No Florida.”

“It doesn’t have to mean that. The three of us, we can still go.”

He glances at the screen again, then tucks it away. “Yeah, I guess.”

“And anyway, I won’t be surprised if he changes his mind.”

In the church parking lot, I give them final instructions. Don’t say anything to anyone. Act normal. If Stacy says something about the beach house, just thank her profusely. As soon as I’m done, Eli trots off to his youth group class. Jed hangs back, walking beside me in solidarity.

“We should go,” he says. “We should go without him.”

“We’ll see.”

Crossing the lot is a challenge all its own. The various quadrants are labeled and color-coded, and you file through hundreds of cars to approach the building, a bit like a crowd of ancient Romans on their way to the Coliseum. Once the international headquarters and East Coast manufacturing hub of a now-defunct plastics company, the building had to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up when the church signed the lease. Despite the vast size, I never feel as dwarfed as I do when I sneak into Deedee’s parish church (which isn’t even a cathedral). The big box is slung low to the ground, like a shopping mall or community college. What it lacks in height, though, it makes up for in sprawl.

I kind of hate it.

The past few years, as the church got bigger, its name was sliced smaller and smaller. For the past eighteen months, we’ve been The Community. My best friend on staff is Holly, the director of aesthetics. (I kid you not, that is her title.) “What’s next?” I asked her. “Are we gonna cut it down to just Unity?” She gave me a serious look. “Don’t laugh. And whatever you do, don’t spread that idea around.”

In the old days, I had a lot of friends in church. There didn’t seem to be so many barriers. Now my status is, at best, ambiguous. Being the wife of a pastor is one thing. You’re on a kind of pedestal, always scrutinized, which can be unnerving. There are advantages, though. You occupy a natural role in people’s lives. To borrow a metaphor, they have a pastor’s-wife-shaped hole inside.

All you have to do is fit in.

This changes when you’re the wife of the Men’s Pastor. No one is quite sure what to do with you. My husband is the one who keeps their husbands out at night, the one their men confide in, the one they share their problems with instead of sharing them with their wives (who are, after all, sometimes the problem). Even people who knew me before Rick’s title changed aren’t as open as they used to be. I’m still a part of their lives. I still go to their book clubs and buy their makeup and vitamin supplements. But I could never talk to most of them, not honestly. I’d be too afraid of what they thought.

Holly has a little cubby of an office in the admin wing. When Jed and I split up in the cavernous atrium, instead of heading for the adult Sunday school classes, I grab two coffees at the Sacred Grounds Café (“Sandal Removal Optional”) and walk them through the security door into the office corridor, where I find Holly’s door ajar. It’s only polite to knock, but have you ever tried knocking with a steaming cup of coffee in your hand?

“Knock, knock,” I say.

“Sister, get in here. I need that coffee stat.”

I slip inside, nudging the door shut behind me.

There’s no desk in Holly’s office, only a round table laden with architect’s sketches for the next build-out, swatches, paint chips, and cardboard file boxes bulging at the sides. She sits on an orphaned conference room chair wheeled down from the other end of the hallway, beckoning me to take the other. As always, she looks impressive in her uniform: a crisp white blouse, a wasp-waisted jacket, and sculpted jeans, her straight blond hair cut in a severe bob. She’s one of those people who decide young what they look best in and stick with it no matter what the occasion. The only real variety in Holly’s wardrobe is whether her sunglasses are on or off.

When she calls me sister, I melt. I never had a sister growing up, and until now never had a stand-in. There have been women I could confide in to one degree or another, but not like this. With Holly I am unguarded, never afraid of being judged, always confident that what I say will be understood. That’s the important thing, understanding. You need someone in your life who gets you. Holly gets me.

Behind her on the computer screen in the corner, the video feed from the auditorium shows the last lingerers filing out of the early service as the worship team wraps up for the thirty-minute break. The volume is muted.

“It was good this morning,” Holly says, popping the lid off her coffee to help it cool. “The sermon wasn’t bad—or the ‘talk,’ whatever we’re calling it now.”

“Don’t spoil the ending for me.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d make an appearance this morning. I saw Stacy just now and she told me the whole family was packing up for the month and moving to Florida. What’s up with that? You say we’re friends, and I have to hear it from her?”

“Maybe if you had a beach house in Florida, I’d keep you better informed.”

“I can get one, if that’s what it takes.”

She’s joking, but the fact is, she could. Holly’s an architect by trade, in her midthirties, now semiretired thanks to her husband, Eric’s, fortune. He may be fifteen years older—old enough that Holly’s stepdaughter is about to graduate college—but in finding each other, the two of them discovered their soul mates. If you believe in such things. All I know is, they’re good for each other.

And yet.

There are two things you need to know about Eric. First, he is a professional fund-raiser. His job is squeezing money out of the rich, and he’s very good at his job. Before they met, he made his millions (literally) in the finance sector, then walked away to spend the rest of his life finding money for worthy causes. I’m not sure if it’s guilt that motivates him or altruism or just the thrill of the challenge. Whatever it is, the work keeps him on the road a lot. Wherever there’s a tsunami or an earthquake or a disaster of any kind, Eric Ringwald is on the first plane down, working the phone the whole way.

Yes, that’s the second thing you need to know. His last name is Ringwald.

Which makes her name Holly Ringwald—just one letter of separation between eighties Breakfast Club sweetheart Molly Ringwald—and she married him anyway. She didn’t even put her maiden name up front and go hyphenated. That is love, if you ask me. They are in love, Eric and Holly, and yet . . . I can tell that my friend is lonely. Lonely in her marriage. Maybe that’s what brought us together in the first place, our unacknowledged common ground.

“Oh, Beth, you’re in a funk, aren’t you? I can always tell. Is it the vacation planning? Everything’s up to you again, isn’t it?”

A funk? That hardly describes it. I’m bitter as cursed well water. You take a drink and you can’t get the taste out of your mouth ever again.

“It’s not just that. There’s Eli’s birthday next week.”

“That’s right.” She reaches for a ballpoint pen and writes something down on one of her canary-yellow legal pads. That scribble will translate into something nice and shiny for Eli, I’m sure. “Eric’s down on the Gulf Coast again, so if you need any party planning assistance, you know who to call. Assuming you’re not going to leave for Florida until after the party.”

“I don’t even know if there’s going to be a party.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t make me spill it. Not now.”

“Beth, really, what’s going on?”

And so it all comes tumbling out, and so do the tears. Crying really does make you feel better, the same way shock makes hiccups disappear. The more immediate trauma erases the longer-term one. For a time. By the end of my story, we’re both dabbing our eyes and then she’s hugging me and patting my back.

I pull away. I try to laugh. “Just look at me. I can’t go out there like this.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” she says with conviction.

If I was an eccentric old spinster in a Merchant Ivory movie, I’d want to share my lovely cottage with Holly and that’s the truth. I’d do the cooking and leave the decorating to her, and we’d be inseparable.

“Thanks.”

“It can’t last, Beth. It’ll never last. He’ll be begging to get back in the house this time tomorrow. If he doesn’t give up the idea before then. Rick’s not stupid. The real question is, are you going to leave me high and dry? Richmond is the dumps, believe me. You couldn’t drag me any farther into Virginia than Arlington, and even then I get nervous when I’m out of sight of the Washington Monument. Eric thinks touring Civil War battlefields is romantic, but, sister, it’s not.”

“You don’t have to convince me. I couldn’t imagine leaving my friends, our little house, Lutherville—no way.” As I say the words, they ring false in my ears. The fear goes deeper than this. I can’t bear trading this life for a new one with the same problems and none of the outlets. “But Jim knows how to bait a hook. You know what he said? ‘You’d be trading a megachurch for a megaphone. You’ll be a big voice in the church.’”

“A big voice in the church.”

“With a capital C.”

“Wow. All that versus being a Men’s Pastor. I see what you mean.”

“And you don’t know any of this. He’d flip out if he knew I’d said anything.”

“It sounds like he’s flipped out already.”

On the screen, the crowds are flowing back into the auditorium. The Community logo flashes onto the projection screens and the lights on stage start to flare. In the old Quaker meetinghouse I remember from my youth, everyone sat in the round with no front or back. You stared into the faces of other people, or at the ground. Deedee’s parish faces forward, including the priest at times. He does some of whatever he does with his back to the audience, as if there were someone behind him looking down on them all. Not us. We march in and the band plays and the screen fills with soulful faces and lifted hands and swaying bodies, our own images reflected back to us, all but unconscious of the symbolism.

“Beth,” she says, seeing my eyes fixed on the screen. “Feeling sorry for yourself?”

“It’s what I do, Holly.” The on-screen service starts to come alive. “You know what? I’m going to go. I think I need it.”

“I’ll go with you, then.” She smiles. “It was a good sermon. I don’t mind hearing it again.”





We sit side by side on the extreme right edge of the auditorium, right under a suspended speaker pumping out the bass notes. A high-pitched vibration rides along with the sound. I can feel it between my teeth. Like the middle-aged woman I am, I cast my eyes back over a sea of worshippers toward the centrally located sound booth, willing them to turn the noise down. Next to me, Holly seems oblivious to it. Buttoned up as she is, Holly’s a kinetic worshipper, a side-shuffling, clap-your-hands Jesus freak the moment the music starts. She sings and closes her eyes and, if everyone else does, raises open palms to heaven. All the while I watch her from the corner of my eye, acting like she’s a bride dancing at her wedding. We are not sisters in this regard, not at all. More evidence that opposites attract.

The poison rages in me. I glance around and it all seems so fake, so false.

You’re projecting, Beth. You’re assuming the condition of your own heart is the condition of everyone else’s. I know, I know. I’m sitting in the seat of the scornful, and I’ve brought my cushion.

Up on stage, the vocalists trill into their microphones and the lights up above throb in prearranged patterns. I try to tune everything out, to make it all go away. I clear enough space in my mind so I can offer up a prayer.

Confession: I don’t pray much, not these days. Not for a long time, actually. I might offer up the random request, like my supermarket wish not to run into church people, but as far as deep, heartfelt communication, not so much. Sometimes I tell myself God and me, we’re like an old married couple, so much in sync that they don’t really have to say anything. Only I don’t know any old married couples like that. Other times I worry what this two-way silence signifies.

Nothing happened that I can remember, no telling trauma. I simply fell out of the habit. Now, when I try to pick it back up again, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m just talking to myself.

I have shared this with no one, not even Holly. Certainly not Rick.

Sometimes Rick will switch on a television preacher and watch a few minutes of snake oil. As the toll-free prayer line crawls across the screen, he chuckles at the craziness of it all, the blue-haired old ladies who sign away their life savings to men in shiny suits wearing gold nugget rings and improbable comb-overs. One of these charlatans, banging his Plexiglas pulpit on the subject of prayer, berated his audience for not letting God get a word in. “You pray and you pray and tell ’im this what you want and that what you want—but do you listen, praise Jesus? Not at all! You do all the talking, then you say God don’t listen! Brothers and sisters, are you lis’nin? That there’s the problem!”

So I heard this, and I stopped doing all the talking. I left pauses for God to fill. The pauses remained empty. I told myself I was foolish to listen to a TV preacher—but doesn’t God use the foolish things of the world to confound the wise? I mean, if he can use a Chick tract to speak to somebody, he can use anything, right? But he wasn’t speaking to me, not anymore.

I started to wonder if he ever had.

Yes, he did. It happened once, if only that. He spoke without using his voice. He spoke with his presence.

It was the summer after I graduated from high school, when Miss Hannah, the Korean War doctor, took me to a place she said I needed to experience. I don’t remember how she knew our family. She seemed always to be there when I was growing up. The frail shrivel of old age had gotten hold of her. Even so, she did the driving that day, making me nervous with her weaving and her not wearing a seat belt. (“I’m too old to learn now.”) We arrived in the late afternoon and entered a one-story brick building that looked from the outside like a dentist’s office. Indoors, though, we found a large room with a vaulted ceiling and the familiar wooden pews arranged to face each other.

At the center of the meetinghouse ceiling was a glowing square of light. There were a few people already inside. They tilted their heads back so they could look at the roof—or rather, through the roof, because the square of light was simply a hole in the ceiling, opening up the room to the sky.

“You’ve never been here?” Miss Hannah asked.

I shook my head. She led me to one of the front benches. To my surprise, instead of sitting, she stretched herself out on the wood full-length.

“It’s okay,” she said. “My neck stopped bending that far a long time ago.”

Tentatively, I sat next to her. I looked at the other people, uncertain what was going on. Miss Hannah told me to watch the sky.

At first it still looked like the sky. The edge of a graying cloud was visible. The occasional bird shot across the opening. As the sun lowered itself, the nature of the light began to change. Minutes passed. After some fidgeting, I found a comfortable way to arrange myself and let my body go numb.

“Keep watching,” she said.

The light was blue now and pure. Bright and glowing. The longer I stared, the closer it seemed to get. Could I touch it? I almost thought so. Once my sense of distance was gone, I lost all concept of time as well. This experience required waiting.

So blue. I’d never seen anything like it before. Not in a museum, not at the movies, not in the carnival tents at the fairgrounds. Yet there was no trickery, no sleight of hand. There was no variation in the hue, no sense of depth. We were gazing into infinite color. The wonder of it was, there was no wonder at all. This was a spectacle available to anyone with eyes to see, always at the same time or thereabouts. Still, I had never seen it, I realized. I had never seen the sunset.

And I wasn’t seeing it now. All this was, when I stopped to consider, the change that happens to a little patch of abstracted sky when the sunlight dies. I sat there unmoving as the time ebbed away, an ocean tide washing away the deep indigo to leave purple midnight in its wake.

“That was amazing,” I said on the way out.

Miss Hannah looked at me sideways. “You think so? I come here whenever I need to remember what the world really is. Sometimes I forget how to look. If that happens to you, you’ll know where to go.”

When my brother called long distance to tell me she’d had a car accident and it didn’t look promising, it was finals week of my first semester. Coiled up with academic anxiety, the news hit me hard. I promised myself that during the Christmas break I would go back to the meetinghouse with the open roof and watch the sunset again. I’d felt a presence there—not just Miss Hannah’s, but the blue throbbing fullness up above and all around me. I wanted to feel that again.

Back home, finals behind me, I tried to find the place where she’d taken me. Though I reconstructed the journey as best I could, I was never able to discover that meetinghouse again. I described it to my parents and to Gregory, but none of them had ever heard of such a thing. And then Miss Hannah got better, but my world became crowded and, well, isn’t that just the way of things?

Up on stage, the worship team transitions from one of their slow numbers, then lowers the volume to a quiet hum. One of the leaders intones a transitional prayer. A haloed floodlight comes on in the rafters, projecting a gold circle at center stage. Rick appears from the darkness, taking the mike stand in one hand, tilting it toward his mouth.

“The Fall Men’s Retreat is coming up in November. We’ve already had a record number of men sign up. If you haven’t made a decision yet, let me share three reasons why you should today . . .”

This is how I first laid eyes on my husband, standing on stage in front of a crowd. He’d seemed so handsome to me, so beautiful, a perfect, symmetrical man gone from marble to flesh. And he had a voice that sounded like the one in my head, a deep and friendly voice, always reassuring. It was Rick’s voice that had drawn me into the BSU meeting, hearing him speak between the songs as I passed the open door. With the lights dimmed, it felt like he was speaking directly to me. I loved the idea of him right away, and came to love the reality soon after.

Now, under the harsh light, his untucked, slim T-shirt clings to his shoulders, proving he still works out. He looks his age under the lights too, making the shirt and the whiskered blue jeans and the white-walled Keds a study in trying too hard. I feel for him, on display, the oldest man on stage apart from the senior pastor, delivering a sales pitch for a church retreat when he’s been told he ought to have a big voice in the church. It also pains me because his anxiety is apparent, the fear of aging and death, the fear of losing something he didn’t make better use of when it belonged to him.

The moment he’s finished, the floodlight switches off. The other side of the stage springs into action, one more upbeat praise song before we settle in. I watch the darkness where Rick’s shape disappeared, looking for the edges of the man I’m trying to love. Too far to make him out, I give up trying. Next to me, Holly starts clapping her hands. I slip into the aisle and make my way to the exit.





“You bailed on me,” Holly says. She sounds understanding over the cell phone.

“I had to. The noise was killing me. I have a headache coming on.”

“Where are you?”

I laugh. “Sitting in the parking lot.”

“I’ll come out.”

“Don’t bother. I think I’m going to head home. The boys can catch a ride with Rick.”

“I’ll tell them if I see them.”

“That would be great.”

The van shudders awake and rolls unhappily through the parking lot, out through the exit where an orange-vested traffic cop is sipping coffee straight from the thermos. At least, I assume that’s what he’s drinking.

A few years ago I never could have made it out of the church without running into a dozen or more friends and acquaintances wanting to talk. Now I can simply vanish and no one knows I’m gone. It’s not such a bad feeling, to be honest.





ACTIVIST + POET.

See, if the last part was meant to be taken seriously, it would have come first. I turn the card over in my hand. Nice and thick. The letters are indented into the paper the way old typewriters used to do it, only the font seems a bit fancy for a Remington or an IBM Selectric. Interesting. I punch the phone number in, resting my thumb on top of the Send button.

This is a bad idea.

Chas doesn’t even remember me. “Beth? Ahhh . . .”

“The lady who stopped the other day, when you were on the median. The one with the teenage son? That’s me.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I remember. Did you have a change of plans?”

“Yes,” I say. “I mean, I got my dates mixed up. You know what? Forget about this—”

“No, wait. It’s perfect. There’re a bunch of us here at my place. Biggest turnout in a long time. There’s a big demo coming up in, like, two weeks. Everybody’s amped. If you want to meet the Rent-a-Mob, this is your chance. Worst thing that could happen is you get some paint on your clothes and get your horizons expanded.”

That chafes a bit, his assumption that my horizons need un-narrowing. Thank you, Jesus fish.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“None of us do, Beth. You’ll feel right at home.”

“That’s truer than you realize,” I say. “Fine. How do I find you?”

I write the directions down, then double-check them at the computer in the kitchen. It’s past two and the house is empty. Rick and the boys haven’t come home or called. He probably sensed the need for damage control and took them to the Outback at Hunt Valley or the California Pizza Kitchen. Where would Rick want to go for his last cooked meal before October 1? Probably Andy Nelson’s to suck down some barbecue.

On my way out the door, I rip a page from Rick’s pad, write a note, and peg it with a fridge magnet: GONE TO MEET THE RENT-A-MOB.

Let him chew on that.