Love in Mid Air (24 page)

“I’ll take the boys,” she says, handing me the armload of wings. “You start pinning these on the girls because…” Because girls
will sit still and endure an uncomfortable costume for thirty minutes and boys will not. Everyone who has ever worked on a
Christmas pageant knows that. You dress the girls first and make them stand and wait. You let the boys play, then get them
ready at the last minute.

I call out for a few of the older girls to follow me and take the costumes into the ladies’ bathroom. Lynn comes in a moment
later and we get a production line of wing-pinning going, fitting each girl and letting her out into the hall with instructions
to send in another angel. We’re almost finished when Nancy comes in to check on how we’re doing. Now that things are rolling,
she seems calmer.

“What do you think of our new picture?” she says, pointing toward a portrait of a red-haired woman hanging on the wall above
the couch. The woman is draped in blue and looking out with a sort of eye-locking directness.

We’d been so busy I hadn’t even noticed it. “Is that Mary?”

“There’s some question as to which Mary,” Lynn says, talking in a clinched way because she has pins in her mouth.

“Jeff doesn’t think it’s the Virgin,” says Nancy, extracting a warped-looking halo from a plastic bag.

I finish with my angel and motion to the next. “Where’d it come from?”

“Well, Miss Bessie left the church a chunk of change when she died, I guess you knew that,” says Nancy. “And a couple of months
ago that mystery niece from Canada finally, I mean like after two years, got down here to sort through her stuff. It turned
out Miss Bessie had stuck names on half the items in her house, things she wanted to leave to specific people. She must have
known… or maybe she did it years earlier. Old people get like that. Nobody’s sure why she left this picture to the church.
We figure it’s a saint of some sort, but Miss Bessie certainly wasn’t Catholic so I don’t know why she would have an oil painting
of a saint.”

“It’s Mary Magdalene,” Lynn says, a little more firmly. She’s taking classes at divinity school two nights a week and it clearly
bothers her that Nancy never seems to remember that. The pins are out of Lynn’s mouth now and she’s moved on to the halos.
“You can tell because she has red hair. It was tradition to paint—” She hesitates, just long enough that I know she started
to say the word “whores” but stopped herself when she remembered all the angels in the room. Lynn hands Nancy a halo and a
few bobby pins. “If a woman in a painting had red hair it was a sign she was a certain kind of woman.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Nancy says. She’s a little flushed.

“She’s right,” I say. “But Mary Magdalene probably wasn’t a—you know, a businesswoman. They’re changing their thinking on
that.”

This is dangerous turf, even for a bunch of Presbyterians. When our book club read
The Da Vinci Code
Jeff had become so upset by the theory that Jesus was married that he’d devoted an entire series of sermons to debunking
the book. It became such a crusade that even Phil had to admit Jeff was going too far. “It’s a novel, for God’s sake,” he
had said as we were driving home one Sunday. “What do you think is really upsetting him so much?” I had merely shrugged, but
truthfully I was with Jeff on this one. I don’t like to think of Jesus being married either. It’s impossible to worship a
husband.

I look at the picture, standing to give it my full attention. The woman looks back at me, her lips slightly parted, her eyes
heavy-lidded, her long red hair caught in a gust of wind that does not seem to have affected her robe. No, definitely not
the Virgin, and it is a little odd that Miss Bessie of the Many Casseroles would have such a painting in her house. It’s double-matted
and heavily framed. Someone spent a lot of money on this picture.

“Well, whoever she is and whatever she did, we decided to put her in the women’s bathroom,” Nancy says, stepping back and
lifting an angel’s chin to inspect her work. “She won’t bother anyone here.”

T
en minutes later Phil and I are sitting in our usual pew, halfway down on the left. The music starts and the lights go down.

The shepherds troop by with their staffs and the wise men follow, the youngest one being firmly pushed out of the vestibule
by a feminine hand, probably Nancy’s. A low ripple of laughter runs through the congregation. People love it when something
fouls up at the Christmas pageant. Last year Kelly and I couldn’t find the myrrh at the last minute and we sent little Jay
Penney down the aisle with a Rolodex from Jeff’s office.

Tory is crouched with the other angels behind the wall of candles. The fourteen-year-old girl who has played the lead six
years running waits there for her cue. She obviously hates the role she’s been cast into, the price she must pay for having
a high, clear voice. Her face is martyred and the angel costume has long ceased to fit her. The bedsheets bind her down, flattening
her breasts, and her tissue-paper wings scatter gold glitter with every gesture. Belinda turns to me from two rows up, mouths
something back that I don’t fully get. But I smile and nod even though my throat is tight and my eyes are filling with tears.
I always cry at the Christmas pageant.

Belinda’s middle child, the girl that she threatened throughout her long tortured pregnancy to name after me, the child who
is so shy that she refuses to be an angel, leaves her mother’s pew and runs to mine. I guess this is what Belinda was asking,
if it would be okay for Courtney to come back and sit with me.

I pull the little girl up to my lap, her small pointy knees digging into my thighs as she climbs. Courtney has always loved
me and I wonder if she somehow remembers the time, years ago, when Belinda left her at my house for the afternoon. We’d forgotten
to get the diaper bag with her bottle out of the car but I hadn’t realized this until Belinda was gone. I didn’t know the
name of the salon where she was going to have her hair cut. She’d barely been gone ten minutes when Courtney had begun to
sob. Her shrieks awakened Tory, who was fourteen months older and soon sniveling too. I had nursed Tory exclusively and I
had no formula in the cabinets and with only one car seat I could hardly take both girls to the grocery. I tried everything
I could think of—pacing and singing and jumping with a baby on each hip.

I called Nancy and said, “Should I give her juice?” and Nancy said no, Belinda was funny about introducing sugar, and I said,
“Do you have any formula?” and Nancy said, “Well, yeah, but you need to check with Belinda first. I think this one needs soy
because she’s lactose-sensitive.”

I could barely hear her above the two screaming babies. “I can’t call Belinda,” I said. This was the days before everybody
had cell phones, the days when mothers could be truly gone, at least for an hour. “I don’t even know where she is.”

“Maybe she’ll look in the backseat and realize what she’s done,” said Nancy, but by then Belinda had been gone too long to
hope for that. If she’d seen the diaper bag she’d already have come back.

“Then you’re just going to have to let her cry it out,” Nancy said, in that cool way she has. “It’s not going to kill a baby
to go without eating for a couple of hours.” But if you’ve ever been with a hungry baby for a couple of hours you know what
that means. Courtney frantically clawed the air with her fists and wailed in deep, heartbreaking sobs. Finally I couldn’t
take it anymore. I stuck Tory into her bouncy swing and took Courtney into the bathroom where I sat down on the closed toilet
seat and guiltily took out my breast. Now Courtney sits high on my lap, kicking my shins with each swing of her legs. Nancy
evidently went overboard on the instructions to the shepherds because when the part comes where the Angel of the Lord appears
roundabout them and they are sore afraid, the boys begin to stagger around, some of them clutching their chests and dropping
backward as if they’ve been shot. The congregation is laughing openly now. There is a great simultaneous click of cameras.

Six years ago I sat on the toilet seat and Belinda’s baby took a couple of deep gulps, shuddered with relief, and then went
limp. She was so worn out with her weeping that she was asleep within minutes. I heard my kitchen door opening and I eased
my nipple from the baby’s mouth, now slack and moist with milk, and jerked my blouse closed. Belinda was standing in the kitchen
when I emerged. She said she couldn’t believe she’d done that. She was an idiot. How had I managed, how had I coped? I knew
how hard it could be to get away for an afternoon and now she was nearly in tears. She’d blown it. She’d realized her mistake
just after the shampoo and she’d pulled off the plastic smock and walked out and now she was going to have to start all over
again, lining up people to keep three kids and swapping off favors with half the women in the neighborhood. I said the baby
had fretted for a minute but then dozed right off. I never told Belinda what I’d done, something worse than sleeping with
her husband, and I wouldn’t confess it to her now, although, to be honest, it’s the only time in all the years we’ve known
each other that I’ve been any real kind of friend to her at all.

The angels come forward, lifting their arms, and begin to sing a sweet shaky carol. Tory is near the middle and she glances
at us to make sure that we’re where we always sit and then she turns her full attention to Megan, the choir director who has
saved her marriage and expanded her house. Tory’s face is serious and beside me Phil shifts a little in his pew, as if his
body is taking on the weight of her anxiety. “She knows the song great,” I whisper, and he nods, but his eyes never leave
his daughter.

The angels gaze down into the manger where the role of Baby Jesus is being played by a forty-watt lightbulb. Where is Mary
Magdalene in this pageant? I think, and then I remember that no, of course she would not be here. She would be a baby herself
at this time—a baby girl in the midst of Herod’s reign of infanticide, unimportant and thus totally safe. It would be years
before she grew up and met the man who saved her and thrust her into danger. I think of the picture in the ladies’ room, the
expression that I interpreted as desire but which could just as easily have been fear. Because they look alike, don’t they?
The same parted lips, entreating arms, slightly glazed eyes. What was she looking at? Or, more likely, who was she looking
at?

Phil slides his arm along my back, drapes it over my shoulders. Tory’s face is reflected in the dim light of the glowing manger
and I smile at her although I know she probably can’t see me. There are illusions all around us, some more persuasive than
others, and despite what I say, I don’t really believe that you can step out just a little. My foolish assertion that marriage
is a door you walk in and out of… my comfortable myth that you can leave, look up and say, “Oh, it’s raining,” and dash back
in. In my heart, I know better. Out is out. You are exiled to the bathroom. You are glimpsed picking up trash by the road.
Or worse, they treat you with that soul-killing gentleness—driving you to parties, insisting that it’s their turn to pay for
lunch, talking to you in that bright slow voice that people save for small children or the recently diagnosed. The music fades
and Courtney wiggles across my lap. I shush her as if she were my own daughter, with the casual entitlement we all share,
that sense of a common ownership in each other’s children, each other’s homes, each other’s fates. Think of all the things
you’re risking, Gerry told me. Think of them all. People here have loved me. Perhaps they love me still, but that doesn’t
mean I won’t lose them. I might make the first change voluntarily, but the others will find me on their own.

When I was a teenager my grandmother used to tell me, “You marry the man, you marry the life,” and it seems to me logical,
perfectly ordinary karma, that the reverse is also true. If I leave this man then I must leave this life. I squint through
the candlelight at the tallest angel, the one who has reluctantly come to tell the good news.

T
he package hits my front stoop with a thud. I open the door to see the UPS truck pulling out of the driveway.

I call Gerry. “Thank you,” I say.

“Did I have a choice? When we were in Miami, you ripped my best tie.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You opened them, didn’t you?”

“Them? There was only one box.”

“You didn’t open it?”

“No. I assumed this was my Christmas present.”

There is a silence on the other end, just long enough to make it clear he has never thought about sending me a Christmas present.

“That’ll be there next week,” he finally says. “In the meantime, I want you to know that I’m a man who honors his debts. The
Panthers beat the Patriots, fair and square.”

Now I understand. He has bought me handcuffs.

“I didn’t think you’d send them.”

“I said I would.”

“I didn’t think you’d send them here.”