“Mrs. Cheek!” my father purred, bowed, smiled ear to ear. “It’s a pleasure to introduce you to my family.”
Seven
OPAL RINGER
SOMETIMES I DON’T UNDERSTAND the rules in this life, I swear before the Almighty.
Take the night I was hired to help serve over to the Cheeks’. I understood why I had to wear the hairnet, and the black uniform one size too big for me, with the crisp little white apron over it—I don’t mean those rules. I mean ways of acting, like what you all did when I came through the kitchen door with the bowl of brussels sprouts.
Sometimes a prayer is like a daydream that you say aloud to Jesus. Sometimes I prayed that when The Rapture came and I had my own tableful of guests, I’d say to whoever it was come through my kitchen door carrying the vegetable, “How you doing, honey? Put the plate down and pull the chair up, and dig in, darling!”
What you all did was pretend I didn’t come through the door with the sprouts, and when you finally had to take them from me because there I was at your elbows, anything you said to me you said in little whispers, not looking at me.
V. Chicken was there and Jesse. Diane-Young. The Reverend Cloward with his wife and Dickie, and Dickie’s sister, Verna. The Peglers and the Cheeks. And me, slowly circling the room with the vegetable, wondering what kind of crack in the sky would come if anyone had said out loud, “Hi, Opal.”
Mrs. Cheek, who looked like a little bug in glasses, was talking to Guy Pegler when I got to her. “What Chester and I aren’t comfortable with is all this endless money raising,” she was saying, “and the TV preachers are the worst offenders, though I’m not criticizing you in particular.” Whispered at me, almost in the same breath, “Opal. Thank you.”
I had a mind to say what Mum said sometimes when she was feeling good and I started a sentence with “Mum.” She grabbed me and cooed, “That’s my name and lovin’s my game,” hugging me to her.
Dr. Pegler said, “You know, Mrs. Cheek—” then, “Dr. Young—”
“Antoinette. Please.”
“Antoinette. A fifth of Christ’s teachings was taken up with money and stewardship.”
Mrs. Pegler said, “St. Paul considered it just as spiritual to discuss finances as he did to discuss the Resurrection.”
By that time I was all the way around to Diane-Young, who didn’t look like herself anymore. Bobby John had told me her hair got cut off, said Samson lost his strength that way. I said she’s not a man, one, and two she was never known for her strength, so don’t be so upset, Bobby John. But Bobby John was, whatever’d come between them since the healing.
With most of her hair gone, Diane-Young looked like a shaved dog in summer, or a plucked chicken. It was the first time I’d ever seen her when she didn’t have on a hooded sweatshirt. She had this long skinny neck sticking out of this pink dress, the color of her glasses. Her little eyes darted up to meet mine when I served her the sprouts, and there was a fast flash of silver as she tried to smile.
She polished off the brussels sprouts and I was headed back to the kitchen while Dr. Pegler was saying, “Do you remember your New Testament? One of the basic teachings is the importance of giving money to the Lord’s work. Now, television eats money like a horse eats hay, but—”
Ripper Blades’ mother was the other person hired to help out that night. She was talking to the cook as I walked into the kitchen.
“Well, at least she’s walking without the crutch,” she was saying.
The cook said, “That little girl did that before any healing.” Then she saw me. “No offense meant where The Hand’s concerned,” she said.
“No offense taken,” I said.
“Opal,” she said, “don’t touch the Crabmeat Imperiale. There’s a tuna-fish casserole for us. We don’t repeat what we see, hear, or say up here, Opal Ringer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I sat over on the stool and watched what was playing on the tiny TV on the counter, an old movie called Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet.
A cosmonaut was saying, “There’s no fair or unfair to a meteorite. You get hit—you die.”
I got to wondering again what death was, anyway, and if there really was a Satan’s hell, or was it all words and no one really knew anything, just made things up.
Like Bobby John before I left the house, trying to come up with this snazzy sermon for Daddy. “Daddy,” he said, “listen here, something interesting I come up with for you. You can use it if you want to. ‘Success’ is spelled with seven letters. Of the seven, only one is found in ‘fame’ and one in ‘money,’ but three are found in ‘happiness.’”
Daddy just looked across the table at him like he was some ant dared to speak out from the top of the anthill.
“Bobby John,” Daddy said. “In the first place half the people come down to The Hand can’t spell period. In the second place, no spelling lesson’s going to pull them out of their living rooms where the TV’s on. They’re getting choirs of fifty and more in living color with all outdoors as a backdrop, and a preacher’s had his hair done down to the beauty parlor, and you’re going to give them a spelling lesson!”
“Well, I tried, Daddy.”
“Yeah, well, tried has got an r, and an i, and an e in it, and so does failure.”
The cook said, “You weren’t invited up here to watch television, Opal.”
“I’m not even watching,” I told her.
“What do you call what you’re doing?”
I thought of telling her I was wondering if there was a hell we’d all
