I Ain't You (with appreciation for & apologies to Alice Walker)
Note: Some language in this story may make it unsuitable for younger readers.
Lois put on the blue blouse, and then she took it off.
“Nowadays that one hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said.
And Lois knew, in a certain way, that Raymond was right. There was a bit more to hug than this time last year. So, after two more time-consuming tries and fails, they settled on her green blouse – with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left side of the collar. She insisted on the pin and stood her ground on the issue when Raymond pushed back. It was almost Christmas, after all. She would have her pin.
Then Lois and Raymond debated themselves through three changes of skirts. The first he said was too frumpy. He said it accented something he called the “camel haunched bags” of her hips. Lois felt Raymond was misusing some terminology here, but she wasn’t completely sure what the correct terms were.
The second skirt was too short. Despite Lois’ longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not “just right”, but Raymond said it would do anyway because now time was on his mind. While Lois had been stuffing herself into the third skirt, he’d glanced at his watch and noticed they were running late.
Raymond tapped his foot and said in a pointed but jokey way – not too mean, mind you, just forceful with a touch of bile mixed in – “Fuck, Lois. You’ve done us again like you always do us. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Fuck, Lois. Late.”
Lois replayed the evening in her mind. Raymond hadn’t been concerned about timing and tardiness when she’d tried to move him along after dinner. Her attempts had failed because Raymond found his second cigar too powerful a force to resist.
Raymond hadn’t said anything about potential lateness when he watched his alma mater play football all the way to halftime in a bowl game named after a cough lozenge. When he first started to move himself, he lamented the loss of the second half as a great sacrifice for the good of the church.
But now it was…Fuck, Lois. Late.
So they left the house and drove to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk. She could hear the tires crunch random patches of ice and snow.
More than once, Lois ventured a hand up the window and wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December wind magnified by the speed of the car. This was something she had done since childhood, and it had always amazed her, although she knew not why.
That simple action, that light touch, had always sparked dangerous and adventurous imaginings within her. And it did again this night. What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the pain? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moments between release and pavement, the moments of air and free flight, feel like?
It was silent in the car, but even with just a fraction of her mind oriented toward Raymond, Lois knew his silence did not indicate peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the conditions, he slowed down dramatically. Over and over he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And, not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s beneath-the-breath mutterings became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.” Lois refused to let his mutterings detract from the silence.
They reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through colored glass. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the rich image of the flakes, light, and architecture as she and Raymond walked toward the front doors. He tugged at her elbow urging her forward. Once, twice, and a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the slick footing of the parking lot. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean, damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? She tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders. 32 years times about 47 Sundays a year. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. So, that was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the sum in her head and quickly gave up. It was a bunch.
The music was in full swing. Lois and Raymond were indeed late. The pews were full – a mild surprise to Lois – but the Lord has a penchant for surprises, or at least Lois believed this to be the case. And – lo and behold – here was a smidge of evidence.
As they walked up the center aisle to their customary seats among the pews, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all such Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by the unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, their seats. They’d always sat in the twelfth pew from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, the two butt-spots on the cushion farthest to the left. They always sat there. Everyone knew that this was so.
Lois and Raymond had been members of the church for over thirty years. Half of those years they had given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they had actually tithed – they’d given 10% of their income to their congregation.
At Raymond’s insisting, that 10% had been taken from their after-tax income. Raymond said God understood. You couldn’t control your taxes, after all. Raymond said God understood this and adjusted for it. In Raymond’s mind this meant that the two of them deserved the two seats that everyone knew full well were theirs.
But what Raymond thought didn’t matter right now. What mattered in the present moment was that there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the spot right next to the aisle, the place where Raymond himself sat Sunday after Sunday. In Lois’ spot was the man’s backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped thing with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his strange, dilapidated luggage. Lois had been taught to say that this type of man was “from the streets.” And yet here the man was, not on the streets, but in their seats. The stranger’s eyes were crammed shut, and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder.
With narrow eyes Lois looked from the choir singing to the mangy invader to the choir and back to the dirty man, and she was unprepared for it all. She was not prepared for the man’s presence, his appearance, and the absurd realization that he was completely immersed in the music of her church’s thoroughly unimpressive choir.
It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd. Was the stranger blind, insane, deaf, all three? Lois was in a state of mild shock and awe.
Raymond was reacting differently. He stared at the man as if trying to melt the stranger with some newly-discovered, death-ray superhero power unleashed through his eyes. But the man was oblivious. He’d been carried somewhere else by the singing. His eyes were closed, but you could see it in his lips. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from teeth which, Lois couldn’t help but notice, were arranged into an intense and unsightly overbite.
At this point Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation. People in the surrounding pews started to notice the scene even though the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed and unbroken. It was clear that Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow church members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him, no, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping. But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away.
With his failure, Raymond started to shake, just a little. He began to vibrate with swelling rage. Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the ten people closest to the drama. Raymond’s face and neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, with each added moment of the stranger’s bliss and the exile of Raymond’s ass from its rightful spot, Raymond became more and more red.
Then Raymond reached a point where he very clearly reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs that help an organization’s members keep track of their progress on a fundraising goal. Their church had had one two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall.
You know the kind. Each week, as the donations come in, the red rises a little higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is reached, the thermometer blows it’s top. Lois had always found the graphic foolish and unhelpful, not to mention subtly sexual. And, besides, who wants their thermometer to break?
Nonetheless, that was what her husband looked like. His red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when it did, when he did, the outcome would not be paying for a new coat of paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip to Haiti for the youth group or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts. It would be an eruption, a paroxysm of rage.
Still the dirty man swayed. Still her husband reddened and stayed rigid. And then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came out of his reverie and looked to his left, looked at Raymond. Then the stranger looked at Lois and, finally, back to Raymond once more.
It was in that very moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground right there in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary. And then a wave of chaos broke over them all.
Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantaneously. A few of its members started down the steps toward them. These were the good people for whom shock and crisis elicits the sacred desire to care. But overall the situation was chaos, as anyone would rightfully expect it to be.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her husband. She was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body upon the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, her eyes focused not on her husband but on the stranger. Moving quickly, the man from the street leaned over her husband’s body, practically went nose to nose with him, and blew a great, breathy whisper into Raymond’s face. What the man said, Lois could not decipher.
Then the stranger rose up and moved clear of Raymond’s body just as the first responders from the choir reached Raymond and the crowd started to press in. Everyone except Lois was focused on Raymond. The strange man was forgotten. He moved through the crowd unmolested and made his way for the doors. Then he was gone.
Raymond’s body shook. Through her shoes Lois felt him seize and shake. It wasn’t the people touching Raymond, jostling him, trying to coax him back to the land of the living that shook him. Lois knew this intuitively. Raymond’s body shook as if someone had used an invisible set of those paddles she’d seen TV doctors use on TV patients with one foot in the grave.
In the very next moment Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed as if he were trying to inhale them all, church building included. On his equally grand exhale, Raymond provided a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear.
“FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!!!!” he voiced atop his first breath after returning from whatever other dimension he’d visited ever so briefly. Raymond lived, again. That much was clear.
In that moment, it all clicked for Lois. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment Lois understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Any of it.
And so it was with rebellion and anger that Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband’s bulk and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She hit the parking lot, kicked off her high heels, and – playing a hunch – turned to the right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her stocking feet screaming and possibly bleeding, Lois finally saw him, the stranger, the man of the street, up ahead of her. He was casually walking up the road in the deep December night. Somewhere Lois discovered another gear in her ancient engine of a body and continued after him even faster than before.
Then it was like everything slowed down in the most frustrating of ways. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never ever comes any closer than the glimmering sliver on the horizon you first spied.
The stranger’s steps seemed broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois couldn’t gain on him, but then as she gave up hope of overtaking him, the unthinkable happened. The dirty man stopped, turned, and faced her.
She reached him. Lois grabbed the shabby edges of his frayed coat. In that odd random moment, Lois realized that he was wearing a black “Members Only” jacket. Even she knew that was lame. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style as to almost be in style once more. What would Raymond think of it?
She shook her head. “Focus, Lois,” she said out loud in spite of herself.
Having a hold of him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed her lungs to heave a few times from the stress of her running. A little spittle from her mouth found its way onto the stranger’s right sleeve. The man saw it but did not seem to mind. Nor did his body language indicate he was in much of a hurry to slip away from her.
She looked at him. And he looked at her. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And, I know it not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eyes-all-shut love for our choir’s singing. And our choir sucks. They SUCK! Only you could love their singing.”
The stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued talking and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control. She did not want to cower. Nor did she want to wail.
She was angry, but how much anger could she get away with given that she was talking to the one for whom Handel’s chorus had been written and the church’s building had been made?
“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It had beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. And, his damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it. I do.
“But, I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will, his words, his ice-cold touches, and his dead-eyed stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could. Sure I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places, like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. That I know.
“But, I won’t go back. I love you. I worship you. I follow you. But, I ain’t you. I…Ain’t…You. You gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground and sat on the shoulder of the road looking up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t there to help her up. It wasn’t close enough for her to grab unless she was willing to start scrambling to her feet on her own.
He held his right hand out toward her with its palm up and opened toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended, curled and extended four of his fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand. They walked on, and the snow started to fall heavy all around them. Within moments all of their footprints had disappeared, swallowed by the storm.
Raymond died at the age of 107. He died exactly 45 years to the day of what his congregation came to call (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Incident.” He died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last.
When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed wife Lois. Everyone knew the story. On that snowy and terrible December night decades before, Lois’ insane confusion and grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the night never to be seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as he could tell, there was only a single silver lining to the tragedy. And it was this one little slice of good news Raymond had repeated to himself over and over again throughout the years.
Lois’ wild and desperate actions on that fateful night bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one, a man whose woman loved him so much that the prospect of losing him had driven her mad.
“Nowadays that one hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said.
And Lois knew, in a certain way, that Raymond was right. There was a bit more to hug than this time last year. So, after two more time-consuming tries and fails, they settled on her green blouse – with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left side of the collar. She insisted on the pin and stood her ground on the issue when Raymond pushed back. It was almost Christmas, after all. She would have her pin.
Then Lois and Raymond debated themselves through three changes of skirts. The first he said was too frumpy. He said it accented something he called the “camel haunched bags” of her hips. Lois felt Raymond was misusing some terminology here, but she wasn’t completely sure what the correct terms were.
The second skirt was too short. Despite Lois’ longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not “just right”, but Raymond said it would do anyway because now time was on his mind. While Lois had been stuffing herself into the third skirt, he’d glanced at his watch and noticed they were running late.
Raymond tapped his foot and said in a pointed but jokey way – not too mean, mind you, just forceful with a touch of bile mixed in – “Fuck, Lois. You’ve done us again like you always do us. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Fuck, Lois. Late.”
Lois replayed the evening in her mind. Raymond hadn’t been concerned about timing and tardiness when she’d tried to move him along after dinner. Her attempts had failed because Raymond found his second cigar too powerful a force to resist.
Raymond hadn’t said anything about potential lateness when he watched his alma mater play football all the way to halftime in a bowl game named after a cough lozenge. When he first started to move himself, he lamented the loss of the second half as a great sacrifice for the good of the church.
But now it was…Fuck, Lois. Late.
So they left the house and drove to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk. She could hear the tires crunch random patches of ice and snow.
More than once, Lois ventured a hand up the window and wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December wind magnified by the speed of the car. This was something she had done since childhood, and it had always amazed her, although she knew not why.
That simple action, that light touch, had always sparked dangerous and adventurous imaginings within her. And it did again this night. What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the pain? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moments between release and pavement, the moments of air and free flight, feel like?
It was silent in the car, but even with just a fraction of her mind oriented toward Raymond, Lois knew his silence did not indicate peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the conditions, he slowed down dramatically. Over and over he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And, not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s beneath-the-breath mutterings became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.” Lois refused to let his mutterings detract from the silence.
They reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through colored glass. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the rich image of the flakes, light, and architecture as she and Raymond walked toward the front doors. He tugged at her elbow urging her forward. Once, twice, and a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the slick footing of the parking lot. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean, damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? She tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders. 32 years times about 47 Sundays a year. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. So, that was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the sum in her head and quickly gave up. It was a bunch.
The music was in full swing. Lois and Raymond were indeed late. The pews were full – a mild surprise to Lois – but the Lord has a penchant for surprises, or at least Lois believed this to be the case. And – lo and behold – here was a smidge of evidence.
As they walked up the center aisle to their customary seats among the pews, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all such Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by the unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, their seats. They’d always sat in the twelfth pew from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, the two butt-spots on the cushion farthest to the left. They always sat there. Everyone knew that this was so.
Lois and Raymond had been members of the church for over thirty years. Half of those years they had given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they had actually tithed – they’d given 10% of their income to their congregation.
At Raymond’s insisting, that 10% had been taken from their after-tax income. Raymond said God understood. You couldn’t control your taxes, after all. Raymond said God understood this and adjusted for it. In Raymond’s mind this meant that the two of them deserved the two seats that everyone knew full well were theirs.
But what Raymond thought didn’t matter right now. What mattered in the present moment was that there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the spot right next to the aisle, the place where Raymond himself sat Sunday after Sunday. In Lois’ spot was the man’s backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped thing with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his strange, dilapidated luggage. Lois had been taught to say that this type of man was “from the streets.” And yet here the man was, not on the streets, but in their seats. The stranger’s eyes were crammed shut, and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder.
With narrow eyes Lois looked from the choir singing to the mangy invader to the choir and back to the dirty man, and she was unprepared for it all. She was not prepared for the man’s presence, his appearance, and the absurd realization that he was completely immersed in the music of her church’s thoroughly unimpressive choir.
It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd. Was the stranger blind, insane, deaf, all three? Lois was in a state of mild shock and awe.
Raymond was reacting differently. He stared at the man as if trying to melt the stranger with some newly-discovered, death-ray superhero power unleashed through his eyes. But the man was oblivious. He’d been carried somewhere else by the singing. His eyes were closed, but you could see it in his lips. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from teeth which, Lois couldn’t help but notice, were arranged into an intense and unsightly overbite.
At this point Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation. People in the surrounding pews started to notice the scene even though the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed and unbroken. It was clear that Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow church members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him, no, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping. But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away.
With his failure, Raymond started to shake, just a little. He began to vibrate with swelling rage. Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the ten people closest to the drama. Raymond’s face and neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, with each added moment of the stranger’s bliss and the exile of Raymond’s ass from its rightful spot, Raymond became more and more red.
Then Raymond reached a point where he very clearly reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs that help an organization’s members keep track of their progress on a fundraising goal. Their church had had one two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall.
You know the kind. Each week, as the donations come in, the red rises a little higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is reached, the thermometer blows it’s top. Lois had always found the graphic foolish and unhelpful, not to mention subtly sexual. And, besides, who wants their thermometer to break?
Nonetheless, that was what her husband looked like. His red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when it did, when he did, the outcome would not be paying for a new coat of paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip to Haiti for the youth group or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts. It would be an eruption, a paroxysm of rage.
Still the dirty man swayed. Still her husband reddened and stayed rigid. And then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came out of his reverie and looked to his left, looked at Raymond. Then the stranger looked at Lois and, finally, back to Raymond once more.
It was in that very moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground right there in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary. And then a wave of chaos broke over them all.
Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantaneously. A few of its members started down the steps toward them. These were the good people for whom shock and crisis elicits the sacred desire to care. But overall the situation was chaos, as anyone would rightfully expect it to be.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her husband. She was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body upon the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, her eyes focused not on her husband but on the stranger. Moving quickly, the man from the street leaned over her husband’s body, practically went nose to nose with him, and blew a great, breathy whisper into Raymond’s face. What the man said, Lois could not decipher.
Then the stranger rose up and moved clear of Raymond’s body just as the first responders from the choir reached Raymond and the crowd started to press in. Everyone except Lois was focused on Raymond. The strange man was forgotten. He moved through the crowd unmolested and made his way for the doors. Then he was gone.
Raymond’s body shook. Through her shoes Lois felt him seize and shake. It wasn’t the people touching Raymond, jostling him, trying to coax him back to the land of the living that shook him. Lois knew this intuitively. Raymond’s body shook as if someone had used an invisible set of those paddles she’d seen TV doctors use on TV patients with one foot in the grave.
In the very next moment Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed as if he were trying to inhale them all, church building included. On his equally grand exhale, Raymond provided a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear.
“FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!!!!” he voiced atop his first breath after returning from whatever other dimension he’d visited ever so briefly. Raymond lived, again. That much was clear.
In that moment, it all clicked for Lois. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment Lois understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Any of it.
And so it was with rebellion and anger that Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband’s bulk and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She hit the parking lot, kicked off her high heels, and – playing a hunch – turned to the right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her stocking feet screaming and possibly bleeding, Lois finally saw him, the stranger, the man of the street, up ahead of her. He was casually walking up the road in the deep December night. Somewhere Lois discovered another gear in her ancient engine of a body and continued after him even faster than before.
Then it was like everything slowed down in the most frustrating of ways. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never ever comes any closer than the glimmering sliver on the horizon you first spied.
The stranger’s steps seemed broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois couldn’t gain on him, but then as she gave up hope of overtaking him, the unthinkable happened. The dirty man stopped, turned, and faced her.
She reached him. Lois grabbed the shabby edges of his frayed coat. In that odd random moment, Lois realized that he was wearing a black “Members Only” jacket. Even she knew that was lame. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style as to almost be in style once more. What would Raymond think of it?
She shook her head. “Focus, Lois,” she said out loud in spite of herself.
Having a hold of him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed her lungs to heave a few times from the stress of her running. A little spittle from her mouth found its way onto the stranger’s right sleeve. The man saw it but did not seem to mind. Nor did his body language indicate he was in much of a hurry to slip away from her.
She looked at him. And he looked at her. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And, I know it not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eyes-all-shut love for our choir’s singing. And our choir sucks. They SUCK! Only you could love their singing.”
The stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued talking and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control. She did not want to cower. Nor did she want to wail.
She was angry, but how much anger could she get away with given that she was talking to the one for whom Handel’s chorus had been written and the church’s building had been made?
“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It had beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. And, his damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it. I do.
“But, I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will, his words, his ice-cold touches, and his dead-eyed stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could. Sure I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places, like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. That I know.
“But, I won’t go back. I love you. I worship you. I follow you. But, I ain’t you. I…Ain’t…You. You gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground and sat on the shoulder of the road looking up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t there to help her up. It wasn’t close enough for her to grab unless she was willing to start scrambling to her feet on her own.
He held his right hand out toward her with its palm up and opened toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended, curled and extended four of his fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand. They walked on, and the snow started to fall heavy all around them. Within moments all of their footprints had disappeared, swallowed by the storm.
Raymond died at the age of 107. He died exactly 45 years to the day of what his congregation came to call (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Incident.” He died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last.
When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed wife Lois. Everyone knew the story. On that snowy and terrible December night decades before, Lois’ insane confusion and grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the night never to be seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as he could tell, there was only a single silver lining to the tragedy. And it was this one little slice of good news Raymond had repeated to himself over and over again throughout the years.
Lois’ wild and desperate actions on that fateful night bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one, a man whose woman loved him so much that the prospect of losing him had driven her mad.