The Voiceover Artist (18 page)

“There are two of us, honey,” Rose Marie said to me. “I'll do the slicing, she'll do the dicing.”

And then each woman let out a laugh that sounded like a recording of her sister's, trilling up the scale and back down again. I laughed with them.

The scheme depended on parishioners doing favors for people they barely knew, as repayment of a favor they had received or a down payment on one they believed they might need someday. But the investments that the people of St. Asella's made in one another delivered a return I hadn't expected. At some point—I did not notice until after it had passed—the help that they provided to one another ceased to be repayment or prepayment of any debt and became what we do at St. Asella's. It became
who we are.
Many St. Asella's parishioners believe in God in a way I never will. But by saying
yes
when we might otherwise say
no
, we give each other good reason to believe in community at St. Asella's.

And when I do something—even something small—for a person in the little community we've made, the doing of it feels nothing at all like going through the motions.

 

•••

 

BECAUSE IT IS
 no one's business and, frankly, because I worry what people in my life will think of me when they find out, I go five months without telling anyone that I've started going to church again. When finally I do tell the person I trust most in the world, I am reminded why I have been keeping word of my churchgoing to myself.

Nicola and I both started our careers as unpaid interns at Cote D'or Designs, a well-regarded, luxury interior-design firm in Chicago. Nicola took my place when I left Cote D'or for my first paying job in the business, but we didn't meet until
2002
, when a colleague introduced us at a gallery opening in River North. There, Nicola and I each discovered how badly we needed to share, with someone who understood it, the trying experience of interning at Cote D'or.

“Did you have to get lunch for Diane?” Nicola asked me.

“Every day,” I said. “The raw plate.”

“With a side of baked potato wedges.”

“Of course.”

“And
do not
forget the dipping sauce,” Nicola continued. “The girl at Vegan Life knew me and my order, which was Diane's order. I had drilled the dipping-sauce thing into her mind. She always, always,
always
put dipping sauce in the bag. Then, one day, my usual Vegan Life girl was out sick or something, I was in a hurry, and I forgot to check the bag.”

“No dipping sauce,” I said.

“No dipping sauce.”

“And Diane sent you back.”

“She didn't have to,” Nicola said. “The second she said, ‘I don't see any dipping sauce,' I started running back to Vegan Life. In heels.”

I laughed.

“Well, dipping sauce is ‘made with real veggies,'” I said, quoting the chalkboard menu we had both seen so many times.

“That dipping sauce is the only thing keeping Diane vegan.” Then, with her cocktail poised in front of her lips, Nicola added, “The day Vegan Life closes, look for Claudia at a pig roast.”

When the opening was over, Nicola and I found our way to the nearest wine bar, where we kept telling our stories. After that, we started meeting for drinks whenever client work took one of us into the other's neighborhood. We became regulars at the various exhibitions and specialty-store openings around town and at monthly meetings of the Women in Small Business Council. I told Nicola about Richard's cheating before telling anyone else.

Nicola Hayes is more than my favorite plus-one. She is my closest friend.

So, when Nicola calls on a Wednesday and asks if I will take her second ticket to a Fall
2009
Humanities Festival session featuring Petra Blaisse, a Dutch designer we both admire, I accept before I ask for details.

“Just tell me when and where,” I say.

“Fantastic!” Nicola says. “It's Sunday at one o'clock in the Art Institute ballroom.”

“Sunday afternoon?”

“At one o'clock. Weird, I know. Don't worry—I'll have a drink if you will.”

“That's so disappointing,” I say.

“What is?”

“That it's happening on Sunday at one,” I say. “I won't be able to go.”

“Oh,” Nicola says. “Okay.”

And she isn't prying, or feeling spurned and petty; she is looking for a way to help when she asks, “What do you have to do?”

Because Nicola is my best friend, I respond without my usual caution.

“I have to go to church,” I say.

“Oh.”

And I hear, in that one syllable, the tone I have heard Nicola use to mask—from everyone but me—her distaste for a small room packed with oversized furniture or carpeting installed over a vintage hardwood floor.

I feel the need to explain myself.

“I started going after I left Richard,” I say. “Just once a week. It isn't even a religious thing. I've met some people there who need help, and I'm trying to help them.”

“What kind of help do they need?” Nicola asks.

“Finding jobs, getting to and from doctor's appointments, meals after surgeries,” I said. “That kind of thing.”

“And you, like, take them to the doctor?”

“It's not just me. Everyone who gets help pitches in to help someone else.”

I wince at my description of the St. Asella's community, which makes me sound naïve and, by implying a
quid pro quo
, does no justice to the sweat equity the people of St. Asella's are investing in one another.

Nicola says, “Can't you skip it this week?”

I sigh. “I can't. A woman in the parish is recovering from pneumonia, and she lives alone, and I need to find some volunteers to make meals for her.”

Relating this detail buoys me a little, as it shows my work at St. Asella's to be, at least in part, a case of women helping women in need. This is something that my friend Nicola can appreciate. But Nicola is focused on another detail entirely.

“What kind of church is this?”

I want to say Unitarian, but I recall that I have just used the word “parish” and guess that Nicola may already know the answer to her question.

“It's Catholic,” I say, as if this fact is incidental.

“Really?”

She is disappointed.

I tell myself that Nicola's decision not to spare me her disappointment is a mark of our friendship, and that I should find her honesty encouraging. But I'm not encouraged.

“Like I said, Nic, it's not a religious thing. It could have been any church. It's just that I was raised Catholic, so that's the kind of church I went back to.”

“But you'd left all that
behind
,” Nicola says, as if I've suffered a relapse.

“All of what?”

“All of that Catholic stuff,” she says. “The all-male oligarchy in the silly hats. The railing against the rights of women and gays and lesbians. And all those pedophile priests!”

“Nic,” I said, “you know me. I hate those things.”

“But you're associating yourself with them,” she says.

“No, no,” I say. “People at this church are helping each other and making a community where there wasn't one. The big Church—the men who make the rules—they have nothing to do with it.”

“I think you're kidding yourself.”

I've heard Nicola condescend before, but not to me. I'm not sure how to respond.

Then, with a heavy breath, Nicola says, “I'm sorry.”

I brighten at the thought that Nicola is over this and that my going to church will be added to the short list of topics that we will never discuss again.

“I wish I'd done more when you left Rich.”

“Oh,” I say, trying to reassure her. “But you did so much!”

“Not enough, apparently.”

This is when it registers that Nicola's apology is not for anything she has said, but for whatever failure of hers may have led to my seeking sanctuary in a chauvinistic, homophobic institution.

I know that if I agree to skip church and join her at the conference session on Sunday, the rift opening between my friend and me will be healed immediately. But I believe what I have said—that the little community we have made at St. Asella's is worth something, and that the Church at large does nothing more than give it occasion to come together once a week. And if there is concrete good for me to do at St. Asella's, and people—many of them women—are counting on me to do it, I don't see how I can walk away from them, even to please a friend.

“Thanks for the invitation,” I say. “Let me know how Petra does, okay?”

“Sure,” Nicola says.

Having thoroughly bewildered one another, we hang up.

The conversation stays with me for days, like a stomach virus. Over and over, I ask myself how well I understand my own involvement at St. Asella's. Is it as I have come to see it—a worldly woman's engagement with people living on the margins? Or might St. Asella's still be, as Nicola suggested, little more than a jilted ex-wife's hiding place?

A week later, when Petra Blaisse has come and gone, Nicola has not called me. I suppose that she has decided that, if I truly wanted to know how Petra's session was, I should have attended it.

Ten cuidado con los ricos.

That night, staring at the shadows thrown onto my bedroom ceiling by the street light, I recall a story my father told me as I sat with my arms crossed in the front seat of his taxi, having been overruled in my wish to skip church that Sunday. When he was a young man living in Zaragoza, he said, my father's friends were mostly like him: university-educated; believers in democracy, labor unions and free speech; young people reduced, in the oppression of Franco's Spain, to making small, anonymous donations to Catalán fringe groups and grumbling to one another in cafés. But among his friends, only my father practiced Catholicism, and they scolded him for what they called his participation in Franco's fascist regime by way of the Church that validated it.

“My response,” my father told me, “was so consistent that, in time, my friends would recite it before I could speak it myself.”

I remember my father waiting, as we idled at a red light, for me to ask about his usual response, and the rush I felt in refusing to play along.

“I would say to them, ‘Franco has taken everything else. This, my faith, I will not give up for him.'”

I may have rolled my eyes. I was a terrible teenager.

“Even your friends will criticize you for being Catholic.”

There was no bitterness in my father's words. He'd long ago accepted this reality as a condition of the life he chose.

Riding in that cab, I resolved, with a venom I was too cowardly to show my father, that:
My friends won't criticize me for being Catholic because I won't be Catholic.

I wonder now if my father knew me better than I knew myself, or if he simply understood the inevitability of life's disappointments and guessed where I would turn when they touched me. My father may also have guessed—correctly, as it turns out—that by the time life was taking its toll on his only daughter, he'd be dead, and she would not have him to turn to.

Awake and alone, I wrestled with the possibility that my friends are less tolerant of me than my father's were of him, and the fact that my involvement with the people of St. Asella's has made me the kind of person I once vowed I'd never become. And the delayed karmic consequence of my having dismissed and disrespected my father arrives as a paralyzing fear that, having so recently lost my husband, I've also squandered my friendship with Nicola Hayes.

 

•••

 

AT HE MARRAKECH
 airport, having already spent hundreds of dollars shipping home four ceramic vases and seven copper lanterns, I stand in line at the Royal Air Maroc ticket counter to check two cheap suitcases bulging with embroidered fabrics, hand-woven rugs and thuya woodcarvings. My feet, soft and supple after my second spa pedicure, nestle into the padded leather soles of new sandals. My toes, painted a deep, dark green, look like two turtle families, each sharing a brown, braided shell. I watch travelers and airport workers as they walk from one end of the terminal to the other, enjoying a range of motion in my neck made possible by a week of daily deep-tissue massage.

When I'm through security, I pass the time in a chair near an unattended departure gate, watching waves of heat rise from the tarmac. As the month-long celebration of my life after divorce comes to an end, I'm not looking forward to my return. Forty-two voicemails await me. None of them are from Nicola. (I've already checked.) I'll spend much of the next month carrying Moroccan handicrafts into the homes of my clients, and half of them, for reasons that having nothing to do with good interior design, will kindly ask me to carry them right out again. And, of course, there is St. Asella's. After a month of having more delicious food than I can sample laid out for me at every meal, I'll go back to coordinating lasagna deliveries for the indigent and infirm and hunting down new jobs for the jobless.