Faith in Literature and Art l Ruminate Magazine

By Susan Woodring

Gwendolyn—not Gwen, not Lynn—doesn’t answer Mrs. Spencer right away. It is raining outside and the two can hear it inside. Hear its gentle slap, slap against the kitchen window, the newly reconstructed window, settled into the new wall; the old one has been knocked down, the room expanded to allow Mrs. Spencer a gourmet-sized kitchen. Mrs. Spencer has asked Gwendolyn to guess how old she is and now is pretending she hasn’t, busying herself with wiping down the counter, sipping from her iced tea. Gwendolyn nibbles at a glob of cookie dough on the end of a serving spoon, considering.
     “Eighteen,” she decides, “maybe nineteen.”
     “Eighteen,” Mrs. Spencer repeats. She turns the faucet on, wipes the sink. “Eighteen,” she says, shaking her head.
     “Maybe nineteen. Twenty at the oldest.”
     “Twenty?” Mrs. Spencer lays the dishcloth over the side of the sink, then turns to face Gwendolyn. The kitchen feels like a boat, cut off from the world. “Did you know I was just twenty when I got married?”
     Gwendolyn shakes her head. She lays the spoon down on the counter.

     Mrs. Spencer nods. “I married Jimmy Spencer. Everyone was surprised.” She takes the spoon and puts it in the dishwasher then leans over to shake the soap in, closes the door. “They were even more surprised when he became a doctor. In those days, he wasn’t very studious. He was curious, though. There are some who say that’s better—to be curious rather than smart.” 
     “Did he get down on one knee to propose?” Gwendolyn asks.
     Mrs. Spencer turns the dial and they hear the machine fill up with water, start its cycle. “I don’t remember,” she says. “He used to sing, back then. He had a guitar.”
     “Did he sing outside your window?”
     “It’s been such a long time, Gwendolyn. Really, a very long time.”  Mrs. Spencer turns away, looking out the window, watching the rain. The dishwasher swishes. “He helped his uncle tend the bees. They were bee-keepers. Jimmy’s mother is a school teacher.”
     “Mrs. Spencer?”
     “Yes?” 
     “You could be sixteen, you look so young.” The rain makes it feel like the kitchen is itself floating, buoyed on the waves. Gwendolyn can feel the motion of water swishing under the wood floor beneath her feet.
     “Oh,” Mrs. Spencer moves away from the window, picking up her drink from the counter. “Oh, no. That’s not right.” She shakes her head.
     “My parents only sing at church,” Gwendolyn says.
     “Do you like to sing, Gwendolyn?” Mrs. Spencer begins taking apart the special gourmet mixer they used to cream the sugar and butter, to whip the dough creamy and smooth and rough with chocolate chips.
     “Yes. Maybe I’ll be famous someday.” 
     “You just might.”
     Gwendolyn smiles, twirling around. The timer goes off, and Mrs. Spencer pulls the cookies out of the oven, the warm-sweet smell of cookies wafting out. She bends over to slide in a new cookie sheet, closes the oven door.
     They are too hot to eat, but Gwendolyn inspects them, fanning them with an oven mitt. Mrs. Spencer slides the baking sheet onto the top of the stove to cool. She frowns down at the cookies resting there and says, “I’m thirty-nine.”
     They can still hear the rain outside but it is just drizzling by the time Gwendolyn leaves. She crosses the dark, wet lawn, moving through the February chill to her own house where there are six other children and a mother and a father. No dog. It is time for dinner; Gwendolyn brings the dessert. She carries the cookies inside a Ziploc bag, the water beading up on the outside, but the inside stays warm and fresh and dry.


“Time to eat,” Gwendolyn’s mother calls. “Kids, time to eat.”
     Gwendolyn finds her seat among her sisters and brothers, helping one of the little ones into her booster seat. The baby is sleeping in the other room. Her father, a preacher, says grace. Around the table, everything is elbows and flashing eyes and clinking silverware and the swell and buzz of everyone talking. Gwendolyn passes the spaghetti and listens for her chance to tell about Mrs. Spencer’s new mixer that makes baking cookies as easy as one, two, three.
     “I have a test tomorrow,” Bradley, who goes to high school, says.
     “In which class?” Gwendolyn’s mother asks, turning in her chair to cut one of the little ones’ noodles. Little Sarah, next to Gwendolyn, eats her spaghetti with her fingers.
     “There’s a soccer game on Thursday,” Catherine, the oldest tells their father. “Can you come?”
     “Mrs. Spencer has a new mixer. It’s space-age.”
     “It’s on the bones,” Bradley tells them. “All the bones in the body.”   
     “Bones?” Jeremy asks, holding his glass of milk in both hands. “Did somebody say bones?”
     “You don’t even have to let the butter get soft.”
     “What time is the game?”
     “There’s over two hundred. Scapula, humerous, ulna…”
     “Betsy Green told me a rumor today.” Rachel, who is in middle school, announces. She sighs. “It’s not true, though.”
     “More milk, please,” Jeremy sings, holding out his empty glass.
     Their father rises and opens the refrigerator. “I could probably get away for a few hours. Who are you playing?” He fills Jeremy’s glass.
     “It takes half the time.” Gwendolyn snaps her fingers.
     “I’ll call them out to you,” their mother tells Bradley.
     “I get down, Mommy, I get down.” Sarah wiggles in her booster seat, pulling at the straps across her middle.
     “She said the new boy likes me.”
     “I brought some home for dessert.”
     “Kids,” their father starts, “we have something to share with you.”
     Jeremy drains his glass. “Milk—it does a body good. It does a bone good.”
     “Fairview. We’ll kill ‘em. It’ll be easy. We’ll clean house.”
     “The thigh bone connected to the back bone.”
     “Your father and I,” their mother says, “are praying about a call.”
     Catherine puts her fork down.
     Jeremy stops singing. “We’re moving?”
     “We’re praying about a call.”
     “There’s a church in Tennessee,” their father explains.
     “Where’s Tennessee?” Gwendolyn asks.
     “Head bone. Now hear the word of the Lord.”
     “We’re moving to Tennessee.” Catherine stares at her fork.
     “Nothing’s decided, not yet,” their father says. “We’re praying about it.”
     “Tennessee,” Rachel says.
     “Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.”
     “Is it a long way away?” Gwendolyn wants to know.
     “It doesn’t matter how far away it is,” Catherine says.
     “Mommy! I get down!”
     “Just don’t make me take biology again,” Bradley says, “at the new school.”
     “I can’t believe this,” Rachel says. “I can’t believe what you’re telling us.”
     “We’re moving?” This time it’s Gwendolyn who asks. “Is it far away?”
     “Nothing’s for sure yet.” Gwendolyn’s mother rises to help Sarah down. The instant she is free, she runs away, as if she fears immediate recapture.
     “We don’t know anything for certain,” her father says.
     “Now hear the word of the Lord.”
   

Gwendolyn’s mother doesn’t let the other children go to Mrs. Spencer’s house. It is the next Saturday, mid-morning, and the air is cool, no rain. She comes outside and stands in the yard telling them, “Let her go. You all stay here.” They watch Gwendolyn crawl through the hole in the bushes, disappearing through the passageway. Then, they shrug at each other, returning to their game.
     Gwendolyn can hear them calling to each other, laughing, but she goes quietly, shivering a little inside her jacket. It’s cold outside today. She doesn’t go to the door, but instead, to the place beside the door, between the bushes and the house. Scrunching down, she settles herself on a pool of white pebbles. She scoops them up and then holds them up to the sun. They are diamonds, she pretends. She lets them go through the spaces between her fingers; they trickle down her arms. She holds her mouth closed as they stream over her face. They are cold and wet from last night’s rain. Some fall to the ground; some are caught in the folds of her jeans. She takes another handful.
     There’s a sudden noise and she dumps out the stones, holding her breath. The noise comes from the garage, a place she’s close to but can’t see. The noise stops. It was just the garage door opening.
     “James. You never told me what you want.” It’s Mrs. Spencer’s voice, from the garage. “Halibut? Grouper? I could make dilled beans. Rosemary chicken?”
     There’s no other voice. Gwendolyn hears a car door open.
     “Jimmy,” Mrs. Spencer says.
     “I have to go, Sheila. I have to.”  It’s a man’s voice. Dr. Spencer.
     “Please,” Mrs. Spencer says.
     “I’ll call you.” 
     “Okay,” Mrs. Spencer says, “Okay.”
     Gwendolyn picks up more stones. She holds them. The sunlight slides over the car as it moves backwards down the driveway, then pulls out into the street. Gwendolyn opens her mouth and begins to feed herself the diamonds, one at a time. Her cheeks fill up and she thinks of a squirrel. But they taste like dirt so she spits them out.
     She is still for a minute. There’s another sound; it is Mrs. Spencer saying another word but it’s real quiet. Gwendolyn can’t be sure she hears her say, “wait,” but she thinks that’s right. She thinks that’s what Mrs. Spencer says. She hears the next words clearly, though. Mrs. Spencer says, “Dilled beans,” to nobody at all before the sound of the door inside the garage opening again, closing.
     She fills up her pockets with smooth white pebbles and then leaves, crawling again through the hole in the bushes. She keeps the stones in her pockets, even though they bite into the soft place on the inside of her hips when she chases her brothers and sisters. Later, she leaves the others and goes to the camellia bush in Mrs. Spencer’s back yard to pick a pink flower. She takes a few leaves for greenery and a few white stones to hold them down but makes sure the blossom shows. She leaves the arrangement on Mrs. Spencer’s front porch, presses the doorbell, then runs away.


Lila Spencer hears the doorbell from her bath and can’t decide who it is. It could be Jimmy, returned, but of course, he wouldn’t use the bell. It could be a neighbor or one of her old friends from the realtor’s office where she used to work or it could be the UPS man, delivering balsamic vinegar from a gourmet foods catalog. 
     “Christ himself,” she considers. Then, because it might really be her husband, she calls out, “Jimmy?”
     There is nothing but the quiet of the house and the muffled yelps and squeals of the next-door children playing. She has been in the tub since Jimmy was called in at the hospital, an emergency, someone’s heart going bad in a hurry. Her fingers just break the surface of the water, and there is a washcloth laid over her face. Since she was very young, she has heard tell that Christ will return during her lifetime. She has never committed herself to religion in a way that felt strong enough to save her, and the idea that He could at any second set foot on this good, firm earth to call believers to the clouds makes her close her eyes, think of other things. Bake-able stoneware. The maneuvers of half-forgotten card games. Once, while she was at the coast, she observed a dying jellyfish, washed ashore. She didn’t touch it—though dying or maybe already dead, she knew it was still dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous then, at its final hour.
     She pulls the washcloth from her face and lets it settle on the water, floating steady at first, then, one corner grows too heavy, starts to droop, the rest, even more slowly, follows. Jimmy isn’t to blame for everything. It’s her choice, obsessing about the dinner choices. He says, “Anything is fine. You’re a wonderful cook,” and for some reason, this infuriates her. She decides now, her fingers wrinkling in the water, that tomorrow, he will have to choose something. He will commit to that much—deciding what they’ll have for dinner.
     “He’d pick the chicken,” she says aloud and listens to her own voice echo thinly against the fogged tile, through the gentle slosh of water.
     It’s the neighbor girl, she decides. It must be. She listens; has Gwendolyn already given up, left?
     Lila slips down, submerging everything but her face and her knees, which jut out, bending her body compact enough to fit. Dead jellyfish are dangerous and so, she read somewhere, are human dead bodies. They carry the infections that killed the body to begin with, plus more. Millions of bacteria and sicknesses descend from without, but more arise, having already been there, in calm, manageable numbers inside the organs, the intestines. Now, suddenly unimpeded, they swarm. Her mother, she remembers, used to caution her against handling dead birds.
     Her own skin, like the gel of the jellyfish, is water-tight. It would have to dissolve away before water could seep in from the bathtub and pool into her pelvis, flood her insides, fill her heart. This was a physiological problem Jimmy handled daily: fluid in the chest cavity from a weak, spongy heart.
     She strains to sit up and goes light-headed; the contents of her skull momentarily upended. She closes her eyes, it passes, and she reaches for the faucet, turning on the hot tap, letting it go for a moment, closing it off. She’s uncertain how the fluid gets there, but Jimmy has told her how he alleviates it: it’s a simple as poking a needle in there and draining it. But dangerous too, a feat of utmost precision. Here, Jimmy bows his head, speaking of the vulnerabilities of the heart.
     The water is too hot now. She leans back, bracing, settling in to acclimate.
     The health of her own heart, in the purely physical sense, is sound. Her lungs are young and elastic, her blood vessels clear of debris. She has two functioning ovaries and a uterus devoid of obvious deformity. All systems go, the doctor has told her, and Jimmy, considering the blood work, seconded his assessment. But Lila knew even back then, when they first sought explanation, there was something wrong.
     Beneath the water, spotted with white-gray soap bubbles, her stomach lays smooth and flat, distorted by the small wrinkles of water. Lila tries to sit completely still, to see everything clear.
     “You’re a wonderful cook,” Jimmy has said, and it’s true, she knows certain tricks. Draining fluid from the heart requires a steady hand, but so does turning an omelet, pinching a crust. Lila whips meringue to airy-silk perfection, and she wants Jimmy, who knows nothing of her quiet days, to beg for a pie. Please, she wants him to say, make the lemon meringue.
     She recalls, from her childhood Sunday school days, that the Bible is full of saintly barren women who eventually, due to God’s grace and not a medically sound uterus, conceive. Lila remembers Hannah, who promised to give her child to God and made good on that promise, taking him, as soon as he was weaned, to the church, leaving him there and returning only once a year to visit and to bring him a new cloak. Lying in the bathtub inside her water-tight skin, Lila understands this much of the story: Hannah dreaded the day she would have to give her baby son away, even though she was giving him to God. She must have hoped those two years of breast-feeding would never end. Maybe she prayed that, having taken the boy at last to the temple, she would herself contract a quick, painless illness or suffer a sudden, tragic fall, and die herself before she returned to her home, where it would be too quiet now, too still—no baby.
     Lila made the same sorts of promises, those and more, but it’s only now, having just watched her husband leave for the hospital and listened to the doorbell call of another woman’s daughter, feeling that ache, that she sees a new part of it. It’s only now that she sees the difference between her weak, desperate pleas and those of Hannah. Hannah was faithful to tell the truth of her sorrows, but Lila could not suffer through.
     “He’d want caramel apple pie,” she decides, but doesn’t have the heart to say it above a whisper.
     When she was in grade school, she had a Sunday school teacher who said smallest of these instead of least of these. Her teacher read, “Whatever you did for the smallest of these, you did for me.” It was an old woman, feeble of body, and she spoke of all diminutive matters of spiritual significance: the little children at Jesus’ knee, the widow with her two coins, a sparrow falling from the sky. She gave out tiny illustrated New Testaments for prizes, small enough for Lila’s dolls.  
     The water, in time, grows cool again, but Lila, instead of adding more from the hot tap, rises to standing and peers into the mirror over the sink. She looks at herself. Her body, though not dead, has proven itself dangerous, inhospitable. If the bell truly is Christ, let her answer, and let him tell just how dry, how barren is that space inside of her? She wonders what is required. What help she’ll need, not only to pray the prayer, but also the prayer that must come before, the one where she admits she doesn’t even know what to ask for.
     She is, after all, thirty-nine, not eighty.
     The key to rosemary chicken is to first rub the skin with good olive oil. Rub it so gently, it’s as if you plan to keep the dead bird, to care for it. As if you won’t bake it, won’t destroy it, won’t lose it altogether.


“I’m not dressed for company,” Mrs. Spencer says.
     “We’re leaving in the morning,” Gwendolyn tells her. She slips into the house, and Mrs. Spencer closes the door behind her. It is months later, spring now, and the trees outside are just beginning to green. Mrs. Spencer walks into the living room, and Gwendolyn follows, touching the picture in the entryway, the lampshade on the table. She lightly traces the molding running along the wall.
     “We have to get up real early. It will take all day to get there.” Gwendolyn comes to sit on the chair next to the sofa where Mrs. Spencer has resettled herself. She’s wearing a pink robe and her face is bare, no makeup. There are books stacked on the coffee table and a yellow legal pad, opened halfway through and graced with the looping scribbles of Mrs. Spencer’s blue pen. Gwendolyn touches the cover of a book. China Road, it says. Another: Imperial China. Mrs. Spencer picks up her iced tea from a paper towel she’s folded into a square for a coaster.
     “Leaving?  You’re leaving?” she asks, holding onto her glass with both hands.
     “Remember?  Tennessee. We’ll have to drive all day,” Gwendolyn tells her.
     “Tennessee,” Mrs. Spencer repeats. She squints, pulling her robe closer.
     “Are you okay?”
     She nods.
     “Are you sure . . .” 
     “You’ll go through the mountains.”
     “Mountains?  I don’t know.”
     “It’s the only way I know of to get to Tennessee.”  Mrs. Spencer laughs.
     “Well, I just wanted to come and tell you good-bye.”
     “I used to live in the mountains,” Mrs. Spencer tells her. “Many years ago.” Her words sound thick and heavy, as if they’re waterlogged. “I used to walk across the river, the water splashing against my calves. Jumping from rock to rock, all the way across, like I was walking on water.” Mrs. Spencer looks at her hands, still wrapped around the glass.
     Gwendolyn listens.
     “I’d pick the biggest rock and sit down on it, watching the water skaters at my feet.”
     “Water skaters?” Gwendolyn asks.
     But Mrs. Spencer doesn’t explain. She just nods. “I was just a little girl then.”
     “You should come with us,” Gwendolyn suggests, moving to sit closer to her.
     “Oh, no. I guess I’ll stay right here. I’m planning a trip,” she says, gesturing to the books on the table. “China.”
     “China,” Gwendolyn repeats. “Wow.”
     Mrs. Spencer smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Wow.”
     “You and Dr. Spencer?” Gwendolyn asks.
     “No.” Mrs. Spencer wipes a loose piece of hair from her eyes. “Just me. Sometimes it’s a good plan, to take a trip by yourself. I have some important things to think about. And I want to learn how to cook lotus root, to make white tea.”
     Gwendolyn considers. The day is breezy and blue outside the windows and her parents are putting the last boxes in the van. Her younger brothers and sisters are skipping through the empty rooms, playing a game, and the older ones are lying on the grass in front of the house, keeping their quiet.
     “I don’t want to go,” she says. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
     “I know.” Mrs. Spencer sighs. “Neither do I.”   
     Gwendolyn nods, as if it makes perfect sense for Mrs. Spencer to go to China even if she doesn’t want to. It doesn’t seem odd to Gwendolyn at all, to skip out to other places; Tennessee might as well be China, for how different it will be from home.
     “Let me brush your hair,” she suggests.
     “Oh, no, not now,” Mrs. Spencer says, shaking her bangs out of her eyes.
     “Please.”  Gwendolyn touches her hair.
     “Alright.”
     Gwendolyn leaves to find a brush, and then returns to the sofa. She gathers up Mrs. Spencer’s long, pretty honey-blond hair while Mrs. Spencer sips from her drink, then sets it down. Her hair falls across her shoulders.
     “Maybe I can come back to visit you sometime,” Gwendolyn says. “When you get back.”

    "That would be nice," Mrs. Spencer tells her. "I'd like that."

Gwendolyn nods and then sets about working out the tangles in Mrs. Spencer's hair. She works with one section at a time. "China," she says, shaking her head, smiling. "All the way to China." She bites her lip and guides the brush through Mrs. Spencer's hair to work out the tangles, careful not to pull too hard.