Now and Again (29 page)

T
ula and the other rising juniors had drawn lots to determine the order of their presentations. As luck would have it, Tula was to go third, after Sammi Green and a tall, composed girl named Wanda Wallace who had moved from Oklahoma City the year before. Most of the presentations were predictable—only Sammi's plan for honoring the heroes of Red Bud and Tula's idea of a new bow station had never been done before.

Wanda had made a PowerPoint presentation with captions that said
HELP FOR WORKING FAMILIES
and
GIVE A KID A BREAK
. Each year someone presented a version of the same idea. Tula herself had played kick ball and consumed sugary snacks at just such an after-school program while she waited for her mother to finish her shift at a local motel. “Role model” was an enduring Rainbow concept, and the older girls who staffed the program competed vigorously for the title of most energetic and most sincere. They were the reason Tula had become a Rainbow Girl, so while the idea wasn't original, it had a proven track record of making a difference in actual lives.

Sammi's presentation featured a series of slides showing men in uniform and other slides showing wealthy donors handing over giant checks to the previous year's Worthy Advisor, who beamed and blushed from her chair on the stage when her picture went up on the big screen. Sammi and Wanda sported broad smiles and gleaming teeth and paused confidently when their presentations were over to have their pictures snapped shaking hands with the people on the stage.

By the time her name was called, Tula was nearly faint with excitement. She had called her proposal Project Purity and had made a rainbow-colored banner modeled on the banner that hung on the wall of the meeting room. But where the traditional banner comprised seven bright swaths of color, hers consisted of eight, with the eighth made of the purest white silk her little stash of savings could buy.

When Tula stood up and tenderly unfurled the banner, she was greeted with an intake of breath. “My project is to expand the Rainbow principles to include an eighth bow station, represented by white to symbolize Purity,” she began. “Purity is not only the highest female virtue, but it also represents cleanliness and health.” When she said the word “cleanliness,” she had an unwelcome vision of her mother swabbing out a toilet at the motel, but she shook the image off. She explained that white was not an absence of color but included all wavelengths within it, thus symbolizing the very essence of the Rainbow tradition. Then she paused to gauge how the audience was receiving her presentation. People had clapped in the middle of Sammi's presentation, and the tall girl had made everyone laugh when she told them that of course they could donate money instead of snacks and toys for the disadvantaged children. But now, except for the tick of acorns falling on the metal roof of the meeting hall, all was silent and blurred, the audience an undifferentiated flotilla of oval faces bobbing on a sea of frothy dresses and not even Sammi beaming out encouragement from the front row.

The silence was broken when someone coughed. Another person shuffled her feet. Tula tried to think of something funny to say, but she couldn't. Tula's strength wasn't humor, but passion, which she hoped would come through when she talked about saving up her money for the silk, about borrowing the motel sewing machine to stitch the panels together, about her plans for rewriting the Rainbow Handbook to include the new station. But instead of emitting sparks of passion and enthusiasm as she rushed through the second part of her speech with the banner hanging limply in front of her, she found herself stuttering and blinking back tears.

That year's Worthy Advisor had been elected by her classmates the previous spring, and presiding over the autumn assembly was her first official act. She was wearing a long white dress for the occasion, and when she got to her feet right in the middle of Tula's presentation, the layers of fabric sprang away from her body and shimmered with subtle iridescence. “I'm not sure we understand,” she said, the words crisp with new authority. “Please tell us exactly how this is a project for the entire junior class to work on over the course of the coming year. It seems like you plan to do it all yourself. It seems, frankly, as if it's already done.” She held her ivory arms out like a queen addressing her subjects, who were fanned out before her and beginning to whisper behind cupped hands.

Tula had thought of this. How purity translated into action was outlined in the last section of her presentation, but she jumped ahead to cover it now. Will had given her a pamphlet on STDs that his mother had found at the prison, and she had adapted it and added cartoon drawings so that it would appeal to middle schoolers. She had been pleased with the final product, but when she held it up, it looked like a piece of folded scrap paper the size of a business envelope. She should have made a giant version of it the way Sammi had done with the checks. “This is a pamphlet I made,” she said. “I thought we could go into the schools and talk to the younger girls about Purity, and also about abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases. I learned at the clinic where I work that this is a big problem in our area and that we need to target kids before they reach high school age.”

“So your project is about sex education?” asked Mrs. Winslow, patting a stray lock into place.

“Really, it's about Purity. But it's a multifaceted approach.”

“So you made a banner and tampered with chapter literature,” said the Worthy Advisor.

“Oh, no! I won't change anything. I only plan to add…”

“Yes, yes. I understand that you want to add a new Rainbow station. But by what right? Who authorized this desecration of tradition? That is what we're trying to find out.”

“I'm presenting it now, with the idea that the chapter can vote on it and adopt it according to official procedures,” said Tula. “I should have explained that right up front.”

But the word “desecration” said it all. Tula barely managed to sit through the rest of the presentations, and as soon as they were over, she slipped out the door into the darkening parking lot. She didn't stay to see whose project would win the vote and the Rainbow scholarship that came with it. Sammi would win it, or the tall girl. In any case, neither the position of trust nor the scholarship would be hers, and without the scholarship…

Above her, the first stars blasted across the universe, and closer in, the dry leaves of an old oak tree rustled in the breeze. Acorns cracked like tiny skulls under her feet, so she stepped carefully, but she couldn't avoid them all. She had hoped Will would be waiting for her, but he wasn't, so she gathered the skirts of her long dress in both hands and started up the road toward home. She was halfway there when Will came laboring up the hill on his bicycle, calling out to her that his team had lost the game. They walked together, the bicycle between them, and talked about shattered dreams and contingency plans and how if the world had a place for them, it wasn't at all clear what it was.

D
olly took her feet out of the stirrups and used a tissue to wipe between her legs. Then she slipped her skirt over her hips and buttoned her blouse.

“Well,” said the doctor, coming back into the room. “Well, well, well. We'll need to start you on prenatal supplements and schedule a sonogram.”

“What if there's something wrong with it?” asked Dolly, who envisioned growing within her not a baby, but a misshapen clot of all the terrible things that could and did happen in the world.

“Why would anything be wrong with it?” asked the doctor. “You know as well as anyone that most new-parent fears are unfounded.”

“But Danny was in Iraq.”

“Lots of our patients were in Iraq or are married to people who were there. Was your boyfriend exploding unused munitions? Was he cleaning up blast sites or burned-out Humvees?”

“Not that I know of,” said Dolly. “But it's not just my own baby I'm worried about. You know I've been thinking about this ever since those poor babies were…you know the babies I mean.”

The doctor tapped a sheet of test results. “Your hormone levels are good and high. It's common to experience mood swings, so let me know if things don't improve in that regard.”

“And I've been thinking about those two reports…”

“What two reports?” asked the doctor.

“The ones you told me about—the original and the one that was altered.”

“Those studies are to do with the First Gulf War, so I wouldn't worry.”

“But why would this war be any different?” Dolly removed the package Maggie Rayburn had sent her from her purse and thrust it toward the doctor. “You told me that a report had been altered,” she said. “Well, this is more evidence that the government knows what's going on.”

“I'll look it over,” said the doctor. “Now if there's not anything else, our first patient will be here in a few minutes. We don't want to keep her waiting.”

When Dolly got home that evening, she poured herself a glass of lemonade and sat out on the porch to drink it. After Labor Day the temperature was supposed to drop, but the backs of her knees were sticky and her thin cotton dress was plastered to her backside. Maybe the doctor was right about the hormones, which would explain not only her discomfort, but also her fears for the little tadpole growing in her belly. Of course fears were normal. And despite the fears, or because of them, she gradually became aware of an inner starburst of hope and significance. Things that had seemed only moderately important before seemed absolutely critical now. How much to eat? Whole milk or skim? Exercise, but not too much. Stop whoever was poisoning the world! But how? How did a person accomplish a thing like that? One moment she was optimistic and the next she was on the verge of despair. What if Danny never got better? Oh, what did she need Danny for!

She called Kathy, the woman who had advised her about making lists of goals and core beliefs. “Guess what?” she said when Kathy came on the line and said hello. But Kathy had news of her own. Her husband had a new girlfriend and had filed for divorce. “It's good you and Danny aren't married,” she said. “Marriage just makes everything more complicated. Enjoy your freedom while you can.”

Dolly's mother wasn't much better. “It's a terrible time to bring a baby into the world,” she said. “So much uncertainty. Why, just the other day my friend Mabel was let go from her job, and the O'Haras are losing their home to foreclosure, and Selma Drew's husband dropped dead of a heart attack—and you remember Hattie Lane? Three hundred pounds and diabetic…no wonder she's losing her eyesight! To say nothing of all those Middle Easterners trying to blow each other up. Still, it's important to think happy thoughts so the baby can have a normal life. Not that he'll have a normal father, but I suppose it's a little late to think of that.”

Her mother dragged her off to church on Sunday. “You're praying for two now,” she said.

“Why are we driving all the way to Red Bud?” asked Dolly.

“I've been going there for nearly a year,” said her mother. “Pastor Price is really good.”

After the service the pastor said that even an out-of-wedlock baby was part of God's plan for Dolly, a comment that served as a springboard for sharing the story of how, way back when, his eyes had been opened to his own life plan.

“There I was, walking home from my job at an insurance agency and minding my own business—at least as much as I usually mind it—when a pure white cat crossed the path in front of me. Pure white, mind you. I didn't think anything of it, but the next day the same thing happened, and it happened again the day after that. On the fourth day, a woman who had lost everything in a tornado came into the office. I told her that the policy she had in her hands had been issued by another insurance company. ‘No, you are the one,' she said. If she had said anything else, I would still be an insurance agent, but she poked me in the chest and said, ‘You are the one.' I know what you're going to say—that I should have known that the three pure white cats were the Holy Trinity even before the woman drove home the point in such an obvious way. But I was a numbskull back then, too thick to see it until I was driving home a few nights later and passed that sign to the Choctaw Casino—the one that says
TURN HERE TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
So I slammed on the brakes and bless me if I didn't make the turn and stay there half the night—first losing my money and then making it back and then losing it again—so that when I finally went home, I was flat-out broke. I thought a lot about that casino sign, and I have to admit that at first I was bitter. ‘It changed my life, all right,' I said when my own pastor pried the story out of me and proceeded to show me how everything fit perfectly together and how the Lord wasn't just calling me, he was grabbing me by the hair. And my life kept right on changing. Eventually I became a pastor myself, and that never would have happened if all of those other things hadn't happened first.”

“What happened to the lady?” asked Dolly.

“What lady?”

“The one who lost everything in the tornado.”

“I've often wondered that myself,” said the pastor. “I'm guessing she went on down the street to the State Farm office and got things sorted out with them, but I suspect she has her own story to tell. Wouldn't it be a hoot if it included me! By all rights, though, we never should have met. She was in the wrong darn place. The wrong place for her, that is, but exactly the right place for me. That's what you have to do, Dolly. God puts people into your life for a reason. Making sense of it is up to you.”

“I've been getting signs now too,” said Dolly. She told the pastor about the damaged babies and how she had felt called on to help them if she could. “Not that I can help those particular babies, but I want to do something to prevent other babies from suffering a similar fate.”