Come Sunday: A Novel (2 page)

“Got your fingers crossed?” He means about the new garage roof and its first test. I nod.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

I point to my throat.

“Oh, you got it now,” he says. I am the last one to get a cold, having nursed Greg and Cleo through theirs for the past two weeks. “That’s terrible,” he says, and fixes himself a bowl of cereal. I look at him while he sets his bowl down and empties the last of the orange juice into a coffee mug.

“What?” he says, looking up and seeing me stare at him. “Did you want some?” Before I have a chance to nod, Cleo is back with a pair of dirty pajamas from the laundry room.

“Mommy, put this on,” she says, already tugging at her bathing suit straps.

“No,” I say, “those are dirty. I didn’t wash them yesterday.”

“But they are clean,” she argues, and thrusts them toward me.

“Cleo, they are dirty and they are your pajamas; you don’t wear them during the day.”

“Put them on!” she insists.

“Look,” I say, pointing to the front of the shirt, “those are yucky, dirty stains; and smell that. See, it’s stinky too.”

“I don’t smell anything. I like these.”

“No,” I say, wondering why it is that I am debating with a toddler. In the half-breath interval it takes for her to whiplash her head and convulse her body as though it had just received an enormous electrical pulse, I think, What am I doing wrong? Are we too lenient with her? Is she becoming the typical precocious preacher’s kid? How do you insist the Fifth Commandment be complied with by a child who requests her own time-out? I hate myself the instant I listen to the voices of the women’s church auxiliary take up their seats in my head and with downturned mouths say,
And she’s the minister’s child! It’s because the mother was raised in Africa, by the natives, you know
.

“But I like them!” Cleo cries, and, quick as a leak, big tears plop over her eyelids and land on her chin. My goodness, but the passions do run deep in this one.

I take a deep breath while Greg’s contribution to the kitchen debacle is his usual halfhearted, exasperated “Cleo!” to which she seldom responds.

“Look,” I say, trying to find the compromise, “you can wear pajamas today if you want to. Just not these.” And then, in the familiar parlance of preschoolers, I say, “They’re so stinky they will make you puke!” and wrinkle my nose.

It works. She smiles conspiratorially, “Puke! Ugh! They are so stinky they will make me poop!” And then she laughs mischievously because she hopes to get away with saying her favorite word without its permissible context of the bathroom. We go upstairs while my tea gets cold and undertake the laborious task of choosing just the right pajamas for the day. She decides on the ones that are too small for her, the pair I forgot to take out of her closet and put in the Goodwill box. But I cannot object again. So she squeezes into the shirt with the sleeves that come up to her elbows and the pants that are now pedal pushers. My old pair of pantyhose pulled over her springy blond curls passes for a wig and the pink purse clutched under her armpit completes the ensemble.

“I’m ready, Mommy,” she says. “Where are we going today?”

“How about to the table so we can have breakfast?” I suggest.

“I had breakfast already.”

“What did you have?”

She mouths something inaudible, which is a sure sign that I will disapprove.

“What?”

“Mints,” she whispers, and I follow her eyes to the empty box of Tic Tacs on her bedside table.

“You ate them all?” She nods. “Cleo, that’s not breakfast. You need to eat,” I say.

“No I don’t!” is her reply as she waltzes out of the room, flinging one pantyhose leg over her shoulder.

“I am going to lose it with this child, Greg,” I announce as I pin my whining daughter to her seat at the breakfast table. She immediately quiets and I feel her seal pup eyes, wide and dark, on me. Ignoring the tittle-tattle old ladies wagging their fingers and chanting,
Not a good mother
, I continue, “If she says ‘no’ to me one more time . . .” and I can’t finish. Then what? Then I will beat her the way your mother has been insisting we do since she was ten months old? Then I am going to throw the mounds of toys I have yet to pick up at you, you in your insulated world of Scripture readings and sermon notes? But none of the “thens” take into account that I have to face myself in the mirror each morning, so they turn to “whens,” as they usually do: when Cleo gets a little older she will be more cooperative; when Greg has more time he will be able to help a little more; when I start to feel better I will have more patience.

“Let me handle this,” Greg offers. He puts down the paper and takes off his reading glasses and peers at Cleo, who will not look anywhere but at my face. She is inches away from crumpling like a discarded tissue, not liking it when her mommy is cross, which is too often these past months. I know she is scared, and for one delicious, sadistic moment I feel pleased at having the upper hand.

“Cleo, listen to your mommy, okay?” instructs Greg with the kindness of a benevolent guru and a matching amount of detachment. She blinks and looks at her hands in her lap when I return her stare. “You have got to be nice to your mommy, sweet girl, okay? She’s not feeling well today.” She nods at him and he says, “Good!” and then to me, on a
winning streak, “I have to leave pretty soon; what would you like for me to do?” It is a patient question, one anxious to redirect the squall. A question that elicits the opposite effect, stirring up the storm in my teacup.

“I don’t know why I have to be a bloody thundercloud before anyone listens to me,” I say, taking quantum leaps that Greg has learned to follow. How quickly the insolence of a three-year-old can come to represent the civil disobedience of all humankind does not strike me as silly, and if it does Greg, his face does not betray him. I cannot simply say, “How about you fix her breakfast while I go take a bath,” which is what I know he can safely deal with. Greg chews on the corner of his lip because he knows he cannot say anything that will help, and takes a furtive look at his watch.

“When did I become everyone’s flunky?” I continue, restacking the piles of dirty dishes. “Why is it I seem to spend all my time picking up after everyone else? Why is it that when I ask you and Cleo very nicely to put your stuff away and tell you that my tolerance for the debris in this house is reaching an apex, nobody listens? Nobody hears me, nobody answers me; if I didn’t know by looking in the mirror, I would think that I didn’t exist!” My throat is seared with the effort of a straining pitch.

“I am sorry, Abbe. I’ll do better, I promise. I’m over the worst of this flu bug and have some energy to do my share around here.” As if doing his share is the answer to all the unnamed things that stand between us.

He gets up and pulls me into his arms. “Come on, cheer up. When I come back from the office, I promise I will help clean up and do a load of laundry.”

My tirade is not about to be petted back into its kennel. “But I thought you were going to take the day off.” I muffle away into his shirt and the smells of day-old cologne, and he hugs me tighter.

“You’re right. Just let me make a few calls, then.”

The words and fever drift away like the spray off easterly blown waves.

We feel the clamp around our thighs as Cleo joins our embrace
and all is forgiven. “Jesus says, ‘Love one another,’ ” she recites. And I rub her head and say, “That’s right, darling, and we love one another by being nice to each other.”

“And kind,” she adds, the litany complete.

“And kind,” I agree, seeing the little old church ladies vaporize.

Cleo makes patterns on her place mat with the cereal I give her while I load the dishwasher. “You got plans for the day?” Greg asks.

“I promised Mrs. Scribner I would take her to the hairdresser around eleven.”

“You’re not required to do that, you know; it’s not in the Preacher’s Wife Manual, is it?”

“That’s not why I do it.”

“I know, I know. You’re recruiting for the Abbe Deighton Lonely Hearts Club.”

“Go ahead and mock me; see how funny it is when you are all alone one day with no one to listen to your clever ideas and laugh at your lame jokes. See how you like it when your idea of companionship is when the cable guy comes to sell you channels you don’t want.”

“I hope you’re not trying to tell me something,” he jests.

“I am being serious. It’s not just that she’s lonely; it’s that she’s treated like an outsider and I can’t stand that.”

“Abbe, no one lets her in because she’s crazy and she smells bad.”

“It’s not funny, Greg. She’s doing her best just to hang on; the least we can do is give her some small encouragement not to let go.”

“ ‘We’ meaning me, you mean?” Suddenly Greg’s tone is defensive.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I protest, although I do not think it would hurt Greg’s ratings, ailing as they are, to spend less time at the office and more time in the field, so to speak.

“Okay, so I guess you don’t want me to call in sick for you?” he asks, and I shake my head. “All right, then. ‘The time has come, the Walrus said,’ ” he quotes, heading for the front door.

“What walrus, Mommy?” asks Cleo.

“Dad means he’s going to check whether our new roof kept the garage dry.”

The two-car garage and workshop, up until a couple of days ago,
functioned alternately as a cistern and a sieve, seldom as a dry shelter for the car. It has been patched so many times that instead of being flat it sagged in the middle so that the birds bathed atop while buckets were positioned beneath it. We made do with buckets until Greg had the gumption to ask his mother for a small loan to help pay for a new roof. He insisted it was a loan, but I am the one who pays the bills each month and who notices that there is never a little row of numbers on our bank statement we can theoretically call “savings,” or which can go toward reducing our indebtedness and my mother-in-law’s righteousness. We will not be able to pay her back the two thousand dollars for roofing materials, just as we have not been able to pay back the airplane tickets for the family get-together last Christmas or her contribution to the down payment on our house. Not unless the church decides to pay its minister a salary roughly comparable to that of a car dealer. Maybe that is what Greg should consider doing: trade in Jesus and start selling Jaguars to aging symphony supporters. Bet he would have more takers than he does now.

I am picturing Greg taking the elderly for test drives when he skulks back into the house, slamming the door behind him. He collapses on the couch with an exclamation: “We should have hired professionals!”

“It didn’t work?” I ask. Jakes and a friend recently paroled from prison just spent two days reroofing the garage. “A piece of cake,” they had said.

Greg shakes his head. “It’s worse.”

Of the two of us, it is typically me who holds the glass-is-half-full policy, so when my husband makes understatements, as infuriating as they often are, they always give me a measure of hope because things seldom turn out to be as bad as he assesses them to be. Just how bad can a bad moon be, I wonder, charging out to the garage to see. The smell of damp and mold is overpowering when I open the door, and then I notice little tidal pools everywhere: between Greg’s tools, next to the storage closet, around the car. What used to be water-stained ceiling tiles is now mush the consistency of porridge on the roof and windshield of our car, and on the tool bench. Water is being siphoned
through the garage door opener. Turds are floating around in the cat tray. Two thousand dollars washed away. Two. Thousand. Dollars. I look up where the ceiling once was and see right through to its exposed underbelly, where it is still leaking although the rain abated hours ago.

Walking out of what will soon be a rust heap, I head for the ladder still propped up against the wall on the south side. Before I mount it, I spot at the head of the pathway next to our mailbox a small yellow box. What on earth? When I approach it, I can tell that it is a box of sandwich bags, and adjacent to it lies one of its bags sealed with something in it. Crouching down, I pick up the bag, and it suddenly becomes apparent what its contents are: dog turds.

I look around. There are no neighbors out on this drizzly morning, not that there ever are, but for a moment I think perhaps someone must have dropped the parcel while walking their dog. That is before I remember that no one walks a dog with a box of Ziploc bags. In fact, no one walks a dog around our neighborhood association, a little cul-de-sac of six homes ruled as though it were East Berlin. Certainly not since Mrs. Chung, the Kaiser, bolted billboard-sized NO TRESPASSING signs to the entry of the private driveway the day after I gave the homeless guy who sleeps on the bus stop bench (West Berlin) some food. It can only be one person. Kaiser Chung!

“Do you know what this is?” I spit, holding high the offending bag as I barge back into the house. Greg lifts his head from the back of the couch, and before he can answer I say, “Dog shit, Greg. It’s dog shit!”

I hear a sharp intake of air. “Mommy, you said a bad word.” Cleo is anxious to inspect my parcel, while Greg looks at me uncomprehendingly. I march over to the phone, flip through to the back of my address book where the association’s homeowners are listed by last name and telephone number. Punching the numbers, I feel the scorching move from the back of my throat into my lungs as I prepare to address the president of the association.

Her answering machine comes on after four rings, after four separate speeches have blazed a trail through my mind. “You have reached the Chung residence. You may leave a brief message after the third beep,” cackles Mrs. Chung’s scratchy voice. I hang up and dial Gillian
Beech’s number. “God bless,” she answers before the phone has completed its first ring.

“Gillian, Abbe here from across the way. You got any idea why I have a bag of dog excrement and a box of Ziplocs by my mailbox?”

“Oh, dear Lord. I told her not to do it, but she has been complaining about your dog for weeks.” Gillian doesn’t need to name the specific “she” to whom she refers; it is pronounced as a proper noun, thereby confirming my suspicion: Mrs. Chung. “She’s upset about him—ahem—defecating on her front lawn. I told her to just talk to you about it, that we are all mature Christians, amen?”