Mum was making macaroni and cheese in the kitchen for dinner. We’d brought Brother Dudley back from The Hand to eat with us, and turned on the TV to watch Guy Pegler while we were waiting for Mum to get everything ready.
“Opal here’s seeing his son,” said Daddy.
“I’m not seeing him much,” I said.
“She’s got a date with him,” said Daddy.
“So you said, so you said,” Brother Dudley answered. “My own little girl married herself a salesman of sporting goods, moved over to Buffalo, New York.”
“So you said,” Daddy said. He was wearing the black coat with the silver lining I liked best of his coats, had his gray tie loosened.
“My little girl and her husband received The Power shortly after meeting, both at the same time, both slain in the spirit, reeling around like a pair of drunks it was such ecstasy.”
“The ecstasy of the spirit,” said Daddy. Brother Dudley would shout it when he was healing: “The ecstasy of the spirit!”
I sat on the couch hugging a pillow, pushing my cuticles back to bring up my moons, and waiting for Mum to call in to me for help. She never did like anybody in her kitchen with her first thing when we got back from The Hand Sunday mornings. She was in there singing “God Bless America” very softly, rattling plates and pulling out the table leaves.
Daddy and Brother Dudley had their eyes fixed to the TV, and I was looking at it too, without seeing it, my thoughts running wild. I was thinking about Bobby John’s secret meetings with Diane-Young. He’d say he was off to a Prayer-and-Share meeting down to Riverhead, then drive off to meet her somewhere.
“They did her over, Opal,” he told me, “getting her ready for the Winning Rally. She don’t look the same and’s all painted like the Devil’s lady. She don’t talk the same, says I don’t have an idea in my head except what’s good and bad, says I can’t ever come up with an in between.”
“In between is Satan’s wedge,” I told him. “So Daddy says.”
“So Daddy says.”
He was going through a torment, I could tell, but he was still the only one I could talk to about being scared to go on my date with Jesse. I’d tell him boy was Jesse Pegler going to be sorry he ever asked me, because even if I did get my moons up, the rest of me was wanting, and I’d look so awful Jesse Pegler’d like to die carting me around. If I’d have told Daddy that, he’d lecture me on vanity, quote me Acts XIV: 15, and if I’d have told Mum that, she’d say I was pretty as a picture and Jesse Pegler’d be proud to walk out with me anywhere. But Bobby John knew what I meant, said them and us was from two different worlds, and sometimes he got to thinking we wasn’t the smart ones, they was; they had all the ideas.
Last night I kicked the covers off trying to sleep in the heat, and thinking about The Rapture. Daddy was saying it was coming, he felt it, and Brother Dudley was agreeing, saying, “Yes, it’s on its way,” while Daddy talked about a golden day going to be here before we knew it.
When Mum kissed me good night in my room, I asked her when she thought it’d come, this month, this year? Would it come after the Soaking?
Mum said, “Oh, honey, it don’t matter when, your Daddy’s so worried about a lot of things, he wants it badly because we’ll get our great reward then.”
“I just wish the Soaking wasn’t the same night as The Last Dance,” I said, “and sometimes I think Daddy planned it that way.”
“Daddy didn’t plan it, Brother Dudley did. And you got to make it to the Soaking, Opal,” she said.
“I will. I said I would.”
“You just pretend you’re Cinderella at that dance and you’re going to leave it before your coach turns into a pumpkin, hear?”
“I said I would.”
“Daddy can’t be asking folks to come if his own family don’t support it. You got half the evening to dance, and then you come down to us.”
“I said I would, I said I would, I said I would. But I hate it. A lot. First time I ever got asked anywhere important and I can’t even stay to the end.”
“Anything happens at The Hand’s more important than anything happens where you’re going.”
“I’m not telling them where I’m going, either. That’s all they’d need to hear. Opal Ringer’s leaving The Last Dance to go to a Soaking! They’d never let me forget that one. I can hear them all now: Where’d Opal go? Oh, Opal had to go to a Soaking.”
“Opal Ringer,” said Mum, “you think about them too much. You think they think about you? You think about them but they don’t think about you, so now you’re lopsided, honey. You got to straighten yourself out.”
“I know it.”
Then I said, “What’s ecstasy, Mum?”
“Ecstasy is what we’re going to feel when The Rapture comes.”
“But I looked it up in the dictionary, and rapture is ecstasy and ecstasy is rapture. I still don’t know what it really means.”
“They’re words, honey. Words can’t always say what things really mean.”
“That’s why they say it’s unspeakable joy, I guess.”
“If you get hot in here, you go down to the living room,” Mum said, “sleep on the couch. You don’t have enough breeze in here to lift lint off the windowsill. I’ll tell you something, honey,” she said, standing in the doorway, “there’s a lot going on in your head coming up from your heart. It’s like foreigners meeting and they don’t speak the same language. They will, as you get older, but right now don’t
