The View from Mount Joy (20 page)

Fifteen

Good morning, you’re on the air with God.

Hi, Kristi. Uh…hi, God.

Sounds like one of the flock’s lambs is calling.

Well…I…um…do you mean I sound young?

That would be my meaning. Now, how can I help you…?

Uh…Jane. My name’s Jane.

How can God help you, Jane?

I just…well…is it really a bad thing if you have sex with your boyfriend before you’re married?

Is that what you’ve done, Jane?

No! No, I…I was just wondering.

I’m glad you’re still wondering, Jane. Now let me ask you—have you ever been on a diet, Jane?

Sure—millions of ’em!

And tell me—how does it feel if you’ve been doing really well on that diet and then you discover your mom’s made a chocolate cake and you think,
Boy, that chocolate cake sure looks good
and so you try a piece and that tastes so good that you have another, and pretty soon you’ve eaten half the cake. How do you feel then, Jane?

Uh…pretty full, I guess.

And maybe a little sick to your stomach, Jane?

Yeah, I guess.

And how would you feel if you have avoided that cake, Jane?

Uh…that I wish I had had a piece?

Work with me here, Jane. When you honor your commitment to lose weight, doesn’t it feel good, Jane?

Yeah, I guess.

Premarital sex is a temptation, Jane. If you give in to it, you might find that one piece doesn’t satisfy you and that you want more and more, and ultimately you wind up sick to your stomach. Believe me, Jane, a commitment to Christ is a lot more important than a commitment to a diet, but the rewards are deeper than you can ever imagine. So be strong, Jane. There’s really no comparison between the holy, lasting banquet that is marital love and the quick fix of junk sex.

Uh…okay. Um…thanks.

“Oh my God,” said Darva as I clicked off the tape recorder.

“Darva, please,” I said. “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain. What would Kristi think?”

A grin finally broke the look of astonished horror that had been on her face for the entire broadcast of
On the Air with God.
The grin grew into a giggle, which expanded into a laugh. The mirth increased until we both slouched in our chairs, done in by it.

“Oh man,” she said, ripping off a square of paper towel to wipe her eyes with. “Kristi Casey, a radio evangelist. The world
must
be coming to an end!” A snort burbled up in her and, defeated, she sank back in her chair, laughing all over again.

“Kirk says she’s on a bunch of AM stations in the South,” I said, examining the tape he had sent me.

“Let’s just hope sanity prevails up here.” Darva looked at her watch. “Oh, I’ve got to get ready, What’s your mom making for dinner?”

“Flora’s favorite,” I said. “Hamburger hotdish.”

Getting up from the kitchen table, Darva leaned over to kiss my cheek. “I wish I could join you.”

“As far as hamburger hotdishes goes, hers
is
pretty unmatched,” I said. “What are you guys doing tonight anyway?”

“Reed’s got tickets to the Guthrie.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
”

“Well, have fun—just make sure you’re home at a reasonable hour, young lady.”

I had dinner at my mother’s every Tuesday night, and Darva usually accompanied me. Flora
always
did; it was obvious she was the star attraction, the most coveted guest.

Darva’s parents had gotten to know their granddaughter, but not for long. Initially her dad thought Flora was Darva, but it didn’t take long before he stopped confusing his generations, because he didn’t remember them at all. He died several months after Darva got back, her mom joining him three months after that.

“Now I’m an orphan,” she had said, calling from her mother’s deathbed. The wistfulness in her voice quickly collapsed under a full-bodied wail.

She was so sad that she reminded me of those old, old women bent over from osteoporosis, even though her burden was guilt, and physically she looked nothing like them.

“I should have been around more,” she said as we ambled along the river. After her mother’s funeral, we’d put Flora in the stroller and taken a long walk, and we’d been walking early every morning since. “I shouldn’t have spent all those years abroad.”

“Darva, I’ll bet your mother
loved
that you lived in Paris. I’ll bet she bragged to all her friends about her cosmopolitan, French-speaking, beret-wearing, wine-drinking artist daughter.”

Darva managed a laugh. “Not wine drinking. Mom was a teetotaler.”

“Then espresso drinking.”

“I hope so. It’s funny—when I lived away from them, I hardly thought of my parents, but now that they’re gone, I think of them all the time. And all the things I should have done.”

“Mama—bir!” said Flora, pointing to a bird flying from a maple tree to a fir.

“Oui, c’est un oiseau.”
Darva spoke both English and French to her daughter.

“You know what your mother said to me the last time I went with you to see her?”

“What?” said Darva, her voice soft.

“Remember, it was one of her good days, when her pain seemed to be under control?” I said. Mrs. Pratt’s fingers and joints were gnarled knobs that were painful even to
look
at. “You were in the kitchen getting her some tea, and she said, ‘There’s no one who makes tea like Darva. I tell everyone—steep the leaves at least five minutes, and warm the milk first—but nobody listens. Except Darva—she has always listened to me. Always took the time to listen.’”

Darva drew in a quick breath, then covered my hand, which was on the stroller handle, with her own. “Thanks, Joe.”

Now Flora was four, and my mother and Len were only too happy to act as surrogate grandparents.

“Grand-mère, Mme. Chou Chou couldn’t come tonight. She has the measles.”

“Oh my,” said my mother of Flora’s imaginary friend. “Maybe she’ll feel better if we make a cupcake for her.”

“Yes, but you do it—my face looks so mad. I want it to look pretty.”

My mother leaned toward Flora. “It looks very pretty, honey, but here, try another piece of licorice for the mouth.”

We were sitting around the kitchen table decorating cupcakes. There was always one part of our Tuesday night meal we had to actively participate in, by either its cooking or its decoration. Grand-mère, as Flora called her, thought it was a fun idea, and she was right, it was. Tonight she had set little bowls of chocolate chips, gumdrops, sprinkles, licorice bits, and nuts in front of us, with the objective of making faces on our frosted cupcakes.

“Tante Beth,” said Flora, “yours looks just like Tante Linda’s.”

“Quit copying me,” said Beth, shielding her cupcake with her hand.

“As if,” said Linda, laughing.

“Look, mine looks like Gorbachev,” said Grand-père.

I squinted, cocked my head, and squinted again, but the resemblance to the newly installed Soviet general secretary eluded me.

“Let me have that,” I said, and after he handed it to me, I tapped red sprinkles onto Gorbachev’s forehead, giving him his trademark birthmark.

“There,” said Flora, and after showing all of us the much prettier smile she had made of licorice, she addressed her cupcake. “Why, you look so good, I could eat you up!”

Which she did promptly, charming us all, as usual.

“You look so bad,” I said to my cupcake, which had a face only a very drunk Picasso could love, “I could eat you up!”

“And you,” said Len to his cupcake, “you look so prime ministerial, I could eat you up!”

He unpeeled the paper wrapping and took a big bite, but Gorbachev was not one to go down without a fight. A blob of frosting, with half a birthmark, dropped on Len’s shirt.

This delighted Flora, whose laugh was a chortle too deep to come from such a little girl. The fact that it did always made everyone else laugh.

That’s what our Tuesday night dinners were like. Inevitably, we’d all sink to the four-year-old’s level (or maybe it was Flora who sank to ours), throwing things at one another, playing with our food, and laughing so hard we might, as Beth did one night, pee in our pants.

Flora might have incited the frosting smearing, but she was always helpful in the cleanup, clearing the table, standing on a footstool drying dishes, or sweeping up crumbs with the little broom and dustpan my mother kept in the kitchen closet.

After she declared that everything looked
très bon
(my mother let Flora decide when we were done with our chores, and she took her job seriously, never letting us leave if there was a counter that still needed to be wiped down or a dish put away), we went into the living room and I sidled up to the piano bench as naturally as a cowboy jumps on his horse.

Len couldn’t sing, but he had an adequate sense of rhythm, which he loudly shared by slapping his palms on his knees. Linda’s voice didn’t like to confine itself to either melody or harmony, but if someone looked in the window at one of our sing-alongs, they might think Norman Rockwell had come back to life and was now directing music videos.

Flora had a clear little voice and a memory that allowed her to learn songs quickly, so that if we sang “A Spoonful of Sugar” one week, she’d come back the next knowing the entire thing. (It didn’t hurt that I had my own piano at home and always obliged her requests to
jouez et chantez.
) My mother was going to start giving her piano lessons, which thrilled Darva, who claimed not to have a musical bone in her body.

“Well, bones aren’t by nature musical,” I told her. “Unless they’re used as drumsticks.”

I was worried about this Reed guy—Darva, who taught French, had led a group of students on a tour through “Les Artistes’ Francais” exhibit at the Institute of Arts, and Reed, visiting the museum himself, followed the group from the Matisses to the Monets, even though he didn’t understand a word Darva was saying.

“I didn’t even know if she understood English,” he told me, “but I asked her out for coffee anyway.”

My reason for worry wasn’t that he was a jerk who treated Darva badly; it was the opposite. Darva seemed to like him a lot, and I could imagine them eventually marrying, which of course would mean she and Flora would move out. At the ripe old age of thirty-one, the most important relationships in my life were a platonic love with a high school pal and an avuncular one with a little girl who, in fact, called me not
Oncle
Joe but
mon
Joe—my Joe. I hadn’t been swept up into a great inferno of passion, but that was okay; these little campfires of love were keeping me plenty warm. And then Jenny Baldacci, in the middle of baking a lemon meringue pie, happened to run out of eggs.

Ever since I had given Shannon, Darva, and those three housewives an opportunity to run amok in the store for their two-minute Supermarket Sweep, I had held other surprise contests. One Wednesday evening, I couldn’t help noticing that none of the kids seemed happy to be there; the aisles were filled with so many whines and cries you would have thought the shopping carts they rode or clung to or ran ahead of were an element of torture. There were a few fathers braving SWC (shopping with children), but by and large the beleaguered parents making threats, pleas, or bribes were mothers.

I went up into my office and rang the bell.

“Good evening, shoppers,” I said into the microphone. “Have you checked out the sale in aisle seven? All Good Home canned goods, four for a dollar. But here’s a special that isn’t advertised, and it’s just for kids, so boys and girls, listen up.” I rang the bell again, for dramatic effect. Many of the shoppers had stopped, as if the act of pushing their cart distracted them from listening. Most of the kids were looking up at the office window. I waved, and they waved back.

“Yes, kids, this is the Haugland Foods Quiet as a Mouse contest. Whoever can stay”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“quiet as a mouse for ten minutes will get to choose any prize they like from the toy department.”

My office wasn’t soundproofed; noise came up through the vents and the thin glass window, and I could hear the whines and cries evaporate, replaced by an excited chatter.

“All right, kids,” I said in my smooth announcer voice, “we’ll start when I ring the bell, and you’ll know we’re done when I ring the bell again.”

A strange quiet filled the store as soon as I struck the bell, and its effect was a thing to behold. Kyle, a toddler who loved to terrorize his baby sister, was now sitting quietly in the back of the cart, holding Tiffany in his lap. Anna and Evan, six-year-old twins who held the store breakage record for a single shopping trip (two jars of pickles and a bottle of chocolate milk) tiptoed solemnly, hand in hand, next to their father. The unruly Grinas, who liked to play tag in the aisles, reached for the groceries their mother pointed at. The looks on the parents’ faces were beatific, as if they were spectators to a miracle.