Intersection
Note: Some language and themes may not be suitable for younger readers.
Rachel gathered her yoga mat, closed the trunk of her SUV, and stared at stick people.
The bottom left corner of her rear window was covered with a family of adhesive stick figures. There was a stick-father and a stick-mother, a stick-boy with an exaggerated baseball cap and a stick-girl with pigtails and a triangle for a dress. There was also a stick-kitty. Her family’s stick-on avatars stood in a row from biggest to smallest, from daddy to kitty.
All of them, (except for the cat) had his or her right hand raised. The hands, which actually had fingers on them, were balled into fists with the index finger and pinky extended. It was the hand sign for the University of Texas, where Rachel and her husband Jonathan had gone to college a decade ago.
For Rachel, one of the perks of parenting was being able to impose your tastes – your favorite music, movies, and even universities – on your children before they even knew what hit them. “I love the Longhorns, and therefore so shall you.” How odd parents were.
It occurred to Rachel that “hit them” had been a horrendous choice of words, even if the phrase had only been thought and never spoken. She felt her chest constrict. She breathed deeply five times. On each inhale, within her mind Rachel said, “Holy.” On each exhale she said, “Spirit.” The tightness released. A little. Three minutes later Rachel was still standing in the July sun staring at the decals, her yoga mat dampening with sweat from her armpit.
She was late for her class. The class met each Saturday morning in the choir room on the campus of her church. Rachel was late, but they would understand.
She weighed her options. Should she take the stick-daughter off the window and leave a hole in the middle of the stick family? Should she really take such bold action and suck her daughter out of the line? Rachel resisted the idea.
After all, her daughter had existed, and maybe she still did in some dimension, some overlapping plane of existence Rachel could not make out with her earthbound eyes. A part of Rachel’s psyche, a part which held veto power over the rest of Rachel, still wanted people in traffic to know her daughter had lived.
“Perity, my daughter, was a real girl,” Rachel thought.
But it felt dishonest to leave the stickers as they were. Her daughter’s dying was as real and as true as her daughter’s living. Perity was a real girl who had been alive, and now Perity was a real girl who was dead.
Not “passed” like some sort of bodily gas. Not “expired” like old milk or an invalid grocery store coupon. Dead.
This was as true and real as Perity’s first tooth and the Dumbo costume she wore for Halloween four years ago. It was as real as her daughter’s vague distaste for her kindergarten teacher.
Because it was real it felt dishonest for Rachel to drive through her daily round of errands misleading people, even the people with whom she only shared traffic, about this essential truth in her life. She was trapped between options.
It felt as if Rachel’s feet had become one with the church parking lot asphalt on a molecular level. She knew as surely as she knew it was Saturday that she’d be physically locked into place until she made a decision about what to do with the damn sticker. It was a stupid and superstitious thought, a magical cause and effect which wasn’t cause and effect at all.
Rachel remembered how her husband had told her stories about how he and his friends would play what he called “prophetic basketball” as boys. They’d take turns shooting long jump shots, and before each shot the shooter would say something like, “If I make this shot, so and so will make out with me this weekend!”
Rachel knew what she was experiencing was stupid like that. But, stupid as it was, it was also true for her. Rachel’s legs would not move until a decision was made. It was a deep, unfathomable magic as real to her in the present moment as gravity.
Rachel didn’t cry. Instead, she made a decision built of stone-solid resolve and bitter anger. She actually spoke it aloud. It came out from behind her lips stilted, overly formal:
“When I return home today, I will get two strips of black electrical tape. I will take the tape and put it over Perity in the form of an ‘X’. This is what I will do. This will affirm the whole truth and deny none of it.”
She looked around, ashamed of having spoken audibly. No one was near her. She was alone. There were no other stragglers on their way to yoga class.
Rachel cried as she walked across the yard to the church’s side door. By the time Rachel entered the classroom, there was a translucent snail trail of snot on her t-shirt. Her church friends saw the snot and knew full well why it was there, but each decided individually to say nothing to her about it. There was nothing left to say. The words had been used up months ago.
For the next hour Rachel stretched and breathed with intentionality and tried to think the thoughts of a corpse. In other words, she tried to think of nothing at all. She also farted once, but to the best of her knowledge no one noticed. Or, at least no one noticed in a way that seemed to lead to her.
It struck Rachel as absurd that she could grieve like she was and simultaneously worry about such social adiaphora, but she had always been told that the human being was a wonder and capable of many mysterious feats.
During the hour of yoga she worked harder at avoiding eye contact than she did on her poses, but she was still able to identify her regular classmates by their body shape and fashion sense (or lack thereof). Of the ten people in the room there was only one person she hadn’t seen before. He was old. Very old. But he was tall and trim and hale in appearance.
Fashion-wise, the stranger wore tiger-print workout pants colored in exactly the way most sane people think they shouldn’t be. He wore a style of pants popular for a mercifully brief time in the late 1980s. As Rachel watched him reach and bend through the poses, she hated herself just a little for deciding with deep disdain that this actual pair of pants must have had its price tag removed in 1988. “Regrettable,” she muttered. “Sad. Just plain sad.”
With her snarky inner monologue spoken and enjoyed, Rachel’s mind took her where she did not want to go. Instead of focusing on “pants”, Rachel’s mind drifted to “workout”. She fingered her wedding ring.
A year ago tomorrow her husband had been driving to the gym with Perity in the back perched up high in her booster seat. Rachel had been riding shotgun. Her husband drove a convertible, and Perity always bitched about the wind in the backseat.
Rachel always threw her weight in with her daughter’s wind-whipped plight. She would tell Jonathan that Perity was right. The wind was worse in the back, and women with long hair didn’t like convertibles. You either had to allow the gale force wind to ruin your hairdo, or you chose to wear a hat which accomplished the same undesirable outcome in the end. It was a useless, cruel choice for Jonathan to force upon the women in his life. With adult arguments like these Rachel would always back Perity on the issue.
But Jon just kept on driving like he hadn’t heard a thing. It had become a bit of a family joke. Replaying the story in her mind, Rachel thought all three of them might have actually chuckled about it on this particular occasion.
Jon, and this was also a bit of a family joke, was an obsessive, diehard open-top convertible driver. If it was freezing cold outside, he was driving open unless it was actually snowing. If the sun was melting the blacktop, he was riding with the top down because no rain was falling from the sky. He might make concessions if passengers were involved, but only slight ones. That ended up being the part of the equation that had suddenly bitten them all in the ass a year ago.
It was cloudy, rain was threatening, but it wasn’t falling that very second, so Jon was squeezing every possible moment out of his convertible, no matter what Perity had to say about it. Rachel too was starting to groan about the unfairness of it all. “What year is this, anyway, Jon? What year is it when two female votes are trumped by just one man’s vote?”
“Honey,” Jon said. “Perity can’t vote for thirteen years. So, it’s one to one, and the tie always goes to driver. But you can control the radio station, if you like.” Jon smiled and drove on with the heavy, gray sky swirling around them. He knew Rachel didn’t give a crap about music, and when she was alone she usually drove in complete silence.
It wasn’t technically the rain that triggered things. It had been the hail, specifically a single piece of hail. Rachel didn’t remember how much hail fell during the sudden storm, but it hadn’t been much, not even enough to be noted by the local weather people. Remembering things from her present perch in the future, Rachel would bet her life it had been the random – the absolutely fucking random – first (and maybe only) hail-ball of the storm.
It had been the cliché, the proverbial golf ball sized piece of hail that’d fallen from thirty odd thousand feet directly onto her husband’s head. It had stunned John, not knocked him cold, but knocked him loopy. In his daze Jon had pulled the steering wheel sharply to the left. Their car had jumped the median, a small truck hit their rear passenger side, and that was it.
Rachel heard Jon moan from her left. She felt herself slowly soak with blood and falling rain. There was no noise, no movement, nothing from behind her. Just nothing. And then Rachel had slept a long, unnatural sleep.
Rachel emerged from her memories to find herself standing in the church yard. Class was now somehow over. She’d rolled up her yoga mat and left the building without knowing she had done it. And now she was standing like an idiot in the middle of a field of spotty, browned grass with lawn sprinklers soaking her shoes.
Rachel, instinctively embarrassed, glanced around the yard. Was someone watching her getting soaked? Her car was the only one left in the lot. The only person she saw was the stranger with the hideous workout pants. He was walking down the road away from the church.
Rachel walked to her car and sank back into her memories.
When she was next aware of her location she was sitting in a burrito restaurant a mile and a half from her church. She was chewing and watching a little girl at the next table.
The girl was a six-year-old with lawless curly hair and freckles. She was enjoying what she was eating. Her whole body bounced from side to side in time with her chewing. When she spoke to her mother, her voice was far too loud and full of food. She begged her mother for sopapillas after the burritos were done.
The girl's mother just let the girl go on and on with her antics. The mom didn't shush her or still her. Rachel guessed the mom was simply sitting back in mild awe at the wonderful riot of life happening within her daughter, and letting the holy riot rage on in its peculiar beauty.
Rachel admired the mom for her reserve. Rachel had always been poor with such things when it came to Perity. Now that Perity was gone, Rachel found herself wondering why she’d parented like that. Why had she quieted down her daughter's voice so often? Why had she pushed a middle-age person's table manners on Perity with something only a stone's throw from mild fascism?
Rachel figured it was because she herself had always been self-aware, self-conscious, and self-analytical to the point of agony. Perity, in the glory of her childhood, had not been.
She’d pushed table manners on Perity, as she had said more than once to other mothers, as a way of making Perity prepared for life, a life where people would no longer forgive your inappropriateness because of your preschool cuteness. And so, if Rachel needed to drain away a little of Perity's intensity for life to impart this gift, then it was worth it, at least in the long term, which is the only term that really matters to mature, good, adult folk.
But that was all a lie. Playing it out in her mind now, Rachel knew deep-down she had been jealous of her daughter's freedom and self-forgetfulness. “How sick,” Rachel thought. “How fucking sick.” Then, as if someone else had said it, she nodded in agreement.
There hadn't been a long term for Perity anyway, and so even this pathetic rationalization, this sacrifice on the altar of a false god, no longer had even a whisper of sense to commend it. Why drip away a little of her daughter's force of life if the whole of that force could suddenly be drained onto the pavement in the span of a few seconds?
The dancing, chewing girl and her mom stood up, purchased a bag of sopapillas, and left. Rachel looked down at the brushed metal of her own table, and did not look up again until she had finished her chewing and her swallowing.
In a way, Perity's death had relieved Rachel of some of her obsession with self-consciousness. When you daughter is dead, you don't really give a crap if someone finds your voice too loud or your hair too dirty. That had been the effect on Rachel for at least most of the time since the accident.
Yet there were limits. Rachel would never allow herself to become one of those grieving moms who doesn’t put on makeup and lets her armpit hair grow out because, after all, who gives a fuck anymore. She was too profoundly vain for that. But Rachel was different now. There was no doubt about that.
With her lunch finished, Rachel spun in her chair to stand up and leave. As she rose, she found herself immediately nose to groin with the workout pants from the yoga class. The shock of it forced a little, quiet shriek from her. Rachel fell back in her seat.
"So sorry," said a voice from above the striped crotch. "So sorry."
The man in the pants chuckled. "I have always had the oddest and most unintentional habit of sneaking up on people. Even as a child, Mommy told me that in a former life I must have been a cat-burglar or a secret agent. So sorry."
A hand broke into Rachel's view. She shook it and looked up into his face.
The face said, "Wendell."
"Rachel."
"It's a pleasure, Rachel. A pleasure. And good fortune for me, I hope."
"What do you mean?" Rachel asked.
"I saw you across the restaurant and recognized you from the yoga class this morning."
"I recognize you too, Wendell. Your pants are a bit unforgettable."
"Oh indeed! Indeed. You may not believe this, but I have had these for over 20 years. Mommy told me that if a piece of clothing still fits and keeps the sun off, you should honor it by wearing it despite what the fickle gods of fashion might say. I am proud to say that though my waist may be two decades older, it is no less trim. And though the fabric may be a bit thin...."
"Wendell, I'm sorry. I must have interrupted your train of thought somehow. You were saying seeing me here was fortunate for you."
"Oh, of course! Of course," Wendell said. "You see, it appears my friend forgot to pick me up as she had promised to do. I walked here from the church, but I am not looking forward to the remaining three miles to my house. Yet, perhaps it is a blessing. For just such a misfortune will help me keep my waste trim and, therefore, these fine pants in service."
“Wendell, can I let you use my phone to call your friend?”
“Thanks, but no. My friend does not believe in cellular phones.”
For some reason Rachel decided to ignore the fact this made no sense.
"Ok. Well, then, can I give you a ride home, Wendell?"
"Oh, wow! WOW!" Wendell said, but then he hesitated. "But, I couldn't ask such a thing. I am a man and you are a woman and we do not know each other and such a situation would be a risky proposition for you."
"Oh, it's fine. I'm not worried. I don't care. I'll give you a ride." And, really, Rachel didn't care. She really didn't. Wendell appeared to have the musculature of a stork. One beer looked like it would get him drunk and two beers set him up for a furious hangover. If need be, she could take him down and probably not break a nail.
But she wouldn't have been worried even if Wendell would have been Mike Tyson, complete with the facial tattoo and the rape conviction. Not caring about such things anymore was just where she was. It might be where she’d always remain. Unlike her vanity, Rachel’s tendency toward self-preservation had been disabled by Perity’s death.
"Goodness!” Wendell said. “That is just fantastic. Top-notch! Whenever you’re ready. I don’t mind twiddling my thumbs a bit."
"My pleasure. Let's go right now." Rachel said this as she stood up and grabbed her purse from the table. Just because she was going to give Wendell a ride didn't mean she wanted a longer experience than was necessary. Rachel had more thinking to do, more memories into which to recline her mind.
They walked to the parking lot and approached Rachel's vehicle from the rear. As they reached it, Rachel started to dig in her purse for her keys. While she did, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Wendell stood studying her stick figure family on the rear windshield.
"My word, these are marvelous," he said. "How phenomenally witty. Your family as stick figures. Marvelous!"
Had he really never seen these things before? When Rachel drove through Mexican parts of town, it seemed every other car had them. Had he not seen all the riffs on the idea, especially the ones with the Mickey Mouse hats? Really?
"So," Wendell said. "You have two children. What are their names?"
Rachel dropped her keys. She picked them up, hit the unlock button, and moved to the driver side. All the while she pretended not to have heard him. This was a moment of truth. What would she say to a stranger? She got into the car. So did Wendell. Maybe he would move on and forget the question.
“Take a right out of the parking lot,” he said. Rachel started the car and followed his wishes.
She sighed with relief.
Once they turned into traffic, Wendell said, “So, what are your kids’ names?”
Rachel started talking just to see what she would say. "My son is named Stephen. My daughter is named Perity. Stephen is ten. Perity is six."
"Perity? I've never heard that one before. How did you come up with it?"
Rachel just went with it. It was a question she’d answered many times. “OK. I was a couple of months pregnant with her, and I was sick, sick, sick. Late one night during my first trimester, I got my husband to take me on a mercy run to the store. You know, to pick up the normal stuff designed to keep you from retching all over the house – saltines, Sprite, that pink goop.”
“Pepto!” Wendell said with great enthusiasm.
“Yes, Pepto-Bismol. Anyway, we pulled into the Walgreen’s parking lot. I noticed the store shared the lot with a bank. The bank was called Prosperity Bank. But, the P-R-O and S were burned out. Just “perity” was lit up. Jon and I had been fighting about what to name a girl if we had one. Well, not fighting really.”
“You and your husband had not come to an accord,” Wendell offered.
“Yep. But, there it was before us, a sign in lights. Perity. I pointed it out to John, and he went with it all the way. It was a very sweet, blessed moment, actually, but….”
Wendell broke in. “But what?” he said.
“But, I think as Perity gets older she might become frustrated with the name. It’s so weird, so out there, and the story of its origin might sound corny to her when she gets older. So we gave her Renee as a middle name. A safe option, should she ever need to exercise it.”
Wendell seemed to take in her story attentively, but Rachel didn't think he noticed her shaking by the end of its telling. The lie of the present tense had left Rachel feeling both exhilarated and weak.
If he’d noticed, he certainly didn’t comment. "Since you have told me a personal story, I’ll reciprocate."
Wendell didn't wait for Rachel to give him permission. "I have always been so aware of how the Lord has been active in details of my life. Just a little example: last week I was eating at The Cracker Barrel. I’d ordered this fried chicken tender meal. There were five tenders. When I cut into the last one, I saw it was raw. Raw! I’d already eaten four of the little buggers, and they’d been fine.
“By this point, I’d eaten almost all of my okra and my potatoes. I told my server. Showed her. And she brought me back a whole new plate. Five new tenders. Two new sides. Remarkable! But it gets better.
“Now, Rachel, you see, I went left to right on the tenders because I’m left-handed. It just felt like the natural thing to do. If I’d a been a righty and ate from the other direction, I’d have hit the raw tender first and missed my blessing. The Lord is good, Rachel. Take a right at the next street.”
As she complied with a right turn, Rachel sat there stumped for a few seconds. She was a little queasy. Then Rachel said, “Wendell, I remember a time in my life when I really hated my job. And I was wrestling with the whole ‘do I stay or do I go’ thing. So, I walked into a dollar store to get some snacks and decided to buy a reusable grocery bag. Every flipping bag they had said ‘Bloom Where You’re Planted’ on it. So, I figured that was my sign.
“Then I went to lunch at a Chinese place. My fortune cookie said, ‘It is time for you to journey to new shores.’ I mean, really? Which is it, Mr. All-Powerful Happenstance?” Rachel’s tone was rougher than she wanted, but she couldn’t control it, couldn’t tamp it down.
Wendell just picked things up again. He seemed oblivious to Rachel’s tone, to her words, to her death grip on the steering wheel.
He said, “Anyway, the chicken tender story is not the one I really want to tell you. Here it is: My first wife – God rest her soul – and I were strawberry farmers way back before you were born. This one week we were just flooded by orders. It was a Sunday evening and everyone was coming Monday to pick up their berries.
“As the sun was setting, I walked out into the fields, and all I saw was green. Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t imagining the green of money. I was looking at green, unripe, unpalatable, unsellable strawberries. So, right out there in the field I said, ‘Lord, I need a little help. Lord, come and touch my berries. Do me a kindness and touch my little berries, Jesus. Make my berries red, Lord.”
Rachel thought Wendell’s prayer had been, to put it mildly, oddly phrased. She broke in. “You definitely don’t want that phrase taken out of context, Wendell.”
Wendell didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss. He just plowed forward. “Then my wife and I went to sleep, and we slept like babies. I woke up the next morning a little before sunrise. In fact, I greeted the sun in the same spot where I’d prayed the night before. And the field was red. All red. Everywhere. The berries had all been touched overnight. Ripened.
“I went out to pick and my wife started packing and distributing them to the folks as they pulled up. By 10am she was shouting, ‘Wenny! Wenny, baby! Don’t pick anymore. We’ve got enough. The orders are full.’
“Well, there was still a sea of red out there, Rachel, and you can’t waste berries like that, it’s just not right, so I went back to my spot, and I prayed some more: ‘Lord, you gave us a lot of berries. You must have had a plan for all those berries. What do you want to do now, Lord?’
“And then it was amazing. It was like that old Kevin Costner movie with the baseball diamond in the cornfield. Field of Dreams is the name, I think. Every car on the main road just started turning off. My wife and I picked and sold all day. We were filling pillowcases by the end of it. We’d run out of baskets, you see.”
Throughout the telling Wendell had been interjecting “lefts” and “rights” to direct Rachel to his house. Now they’d arrived. She pulled into his driveway. Her queasiness had deepened, strengthened, and spread. She feared she was going to be ill. She tried to hide it, to just get the ride over with.
Wendell turned to Rachel and shook her hand. “Goodness, Rachel, you feel cold!” Then he moved on. “I am so very thankful the Lord has put you in my path today, Rachel. Thank you for doing me this kindness. God has worked through you. Mommy always said the highest calling in all the world was simply to be a mirror. A mirror to reflect the Lord’s love to others. You are a windexed mirror, Rachel. Clean indeed!”
Wendell smiled, opened the door, and exited. Rachel watched the workout pants start the trek up the front walk. She should have waited to see if Wendell got inside successfully, but Rachel couldn’t wait. She needed to go.
She backed out of the driveway and followed Wendell’s curving street for half a mile until she reached her first turn. Then she stopped at the intersection and froze. Rachel couldn’t remember having been there before. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to turn left or right. Rachel strained her mind trying to figure out what to do next, and she felt like a drunk battling to get a key in a lock. The signs didn’t look familiar, and she’d totally forgotten that her cellphone lived to help with such dilemmas. Rachel felt her chest constrict again, and a ripple of panic moved across her flesh. She tried to focus, to clear her mind, to even her breathing, to pray her prayers.
But all Rachel could think of, all her mind could reckon, were images, images of convertibles filled with strawberries and pillowcases stuffed with hail. Someone honked behind her, and Rachel mindlessly waved them around. Then she did it for another car. And then a third. And then a fourth.
The bottom left corner of her rear window was covered with a family of adhesive stick figures. There was a stick-father and a stick-mother, a stick-boy with an exaggerated baseball cap and a stick-girl with pigtails and a triangle for a dress. There was also a stick-kitty. Her family’s stick-on avatars stood in a row from biggest to smallest, from daddy to kitty.
All of them, (except for the cat) had his or her right hand raised. The hands, which actually had fingers on them, were balled into fists with the index finger and pinky extended. It was the hand sign for the University of Texas, where Rachel and her husband Jonathan had gone to college a decade ago.
For Rachel, one of the perks of parenting was being able to impose your tastes – your favorite music, movies, and even universities – on your children before they even knew what hit them. “I love the Longhorns, and therefore so shall you.” How odd parents were.
It occurred to Rachel that “hit them” had been a horrendous choice of words, even if the phrase had only been thought and never spoken. She felt her chest constrict. She breathed deeply five times. On each inhale, within her mind Rachel said, “Holy.” On each exhale she said, “Spirit.” The tightness released. A little. Three minutes later Rachel was still standing in the July sun staring at the decals, her yoga mat dampening with sweat from her armpit.
She was late for her class. The class met each Saturday morning in the choir room on the campus of her church. Rachel was late, but they would understand.
She weighed her options. Should she take the stick-daughter off the window and leave a hole in the middle of the stick family? Should she really take such bold action and suck her daughter out of the line? Rachel resisted the idea.
After all, her daughter had existed, and maybe she still did in some dimension, some overlapping plane of existence Rachel could not make out with her earthbound eyes. A part of Rachel’s psyche, a part which held veto power over the rest of Rachel, still wanted people in traffic to know her daughter had lived.
“Perity, my daughter, was a real girl,” Rachel thought.
But it felt dishonest to leave the stickers as they were. Her daughter’s dying was as real and as true as her daughter’s living. Perity was a real girl who had been alive, and now Perity was a real girl who was dead.
Not “passed” like some sort of bodily gas. Not “expired” like old milk or an invalid grocery store coupon. Dead.
This was as true and real as Perity’s first tooth and the Dumbo costume she wore for Halloween four years ago. It was as real as her daughter’s vague distaste for her kindergarten teacher.
Because it was real it felt dishonest for Rachel to drive through her daily round of errands misleading people, even the people with whom she only shared traffic, about this essential truth in her life. She was trapped between options.
It felt as if Rachel’s feet had become one with the church parking lot asphalt on a molecular level. She knew as surely as she knew it was Saturday that she’d be physically locked into place until she made a decision about what to do with the damn sticker. It was a stupid and superstitious thought, a magical cause and effect which wasn’t cause and effect at all.
Rachel remembered how her husband had told her stories about how he and his friends would play what he called “prophetic basketball” as boys. They’d take turns shooting long jump shots, and before each shot the shooter would say something like, “If I make this shot, so and so will make out with me this weekend!”
Rachel knew what she was experiencing was stupid like that. But, stupid as it was, it was also true for her. Rachel’s legs would not move until a decision was made. It was a deep, unfathomable magic as real to her in the present moment as gravity.
Rachel didn’t cry. Instead, she made a decision built of stone-solid resolve and bitter anger. She actually spoke it aloud. It came out from behind her lips stilted, overly formal:
“When I return home today, I will get two strips of black electrical tape. I will take the tape and put it over Perity in the form of an ‘X’. This is what I will do. This will affirm the whole truth and deny none of it.”
She looked around, ashamed of having spoken audibly. No one was near her. She was alone. There were no other stragglers on their way to yoga class.
Rachel cried as she walked across the yard to the church’s side door. By the time Rachel entered the classroom, there was a translucent snail trail of snot on her t-shirt. Her church friends saw the snot and knew full well why it was there, but each decided individually to say nothing to her about it. There was nothing left to say. The words had been used up months ago.
For the next hour Rachel stretched and breathed with intentionality and tried to think the thoughts of a corpse. In other words, she tried to think of nothing at all. She also farted once, but to the best of her knowledge no one noticed. Or, at least no one noticed in a way that seemed to lead to her.
It struck Rachel as absurd that she could grieve like she was and simultaneously worry about such social adiaphora, but she had always been told that the human being was a wonder and capable of many mysterious feats.
During the hour of yoga she worked harder at avoiding eye contact than she did on her poses, but she was still able to identify her regular classmates by their body shape and fashion sense (or lack thereof). Of the ten people in the room there was only one person she hadn’t seen before. He was old. Very old. But he was tall and trim and hale in appearance.
Fashion-wise, the stranger wore tiger-print workout pants colored in exactly the way most sane people think they shouldn’t be. He wore a style of pants popular for a mercifully brief time in the late 1980s. As Rachel watched him reach and bend through the poses, she hated herself just a little for deciding with deep disdain that this actual pair of pants must have had its price tag removed in 1988. “Regrettable,” she muttered. “Sad. Just plain sad.”
With her snarky inner monologue spoken and enjoyed, Rachel’s mind took her where she did not want to go. Instead of focusing on “pants”, Rachel’s mind drifted to “workout”. She fingered her wedding ring.
A year ago tomorrow her husband had been driving to the gym with Perity in the back perched up high in her booster seat. Rachel had been riding shotgun. Her husband drove a convertible, and Perity always bitched about the wind in the backseat.
Rachel always threw her weight in with her daughter’s wind-whipped plight. She would tell Jonathan that Perity was right. The wind was worse in the back, and women with long hair didn’t like convertibles. You either had to allow the gale force wind to ruin your hairdo, or you chose to wear a hat which accomplished the same undesirable outcome in the end. It was a useless, cruel choice for Jonathan to force upon the women in his life. With adult arguments like these Rachel would always back Perity on the issue.
But Jon just kept on driving like he hadn’t heard a thing. It had become a bit of a family joke. Replaying the story in her mind, Rachel thought all three of them might have actually chuckled about it on this particular occasion.
Jon, and this was also a bit of a family joke, was an obsessive, diehard open-top convertible driver. If it was freezing cold outside, he was driving open unless it was actually snowing. If the sun was melting the blacktop, he was riding with the top down because no rain was falling from the sky. He might make concessions if passengers were involved, but only slight ones. That ended up being the part of the equation that had suddenly bitten them all in the ass a year ago.
It was cloudy, rain was threatening, but it wasn’t falling that very second, so Jon was squeezing every possible moment out of his convertible, no matter what Perity had to say about it. Rachel too was starting to groan about the unfairness of it all. “What year is this, anyway, Jon? What year is it when two female votes are trumped by just one man’s vote?”
“Honey,” Jon said. “Perity can’t vote for thirteen years. So, it’s one to one, and the tie always goes to driver. But you can control the radio station, if you like.” Jon smiled and drove on with the heavy, gray sky swirling around them. He knew Rachel didn’t give a crap about music, and when she was alone she usually drove in complete silence.
It wasn’t technically the rain that triggered things. It had been the hail, specifically a single piece of hail. Rachel didn’t remember how much hail fell during the sudden storm, but it hadn’t been much, not even enough to be noted by the local weather people. Remembering things from her present perch in the future, Rachel would bet her life it had been the random – the absolutely fucking random – first (and maybe only) hail-ball of the storm.
It had been the cliché, the proverbial golf ball sized piece of hail that’d fallen from thirty odd thousand feet directly onto her husband’s head. It had stunned John, not knocked him cold, but knocked him loopy. In his daze Jon had pulled the steering wheel sharply to the left. Their car had jumped the median, a small truck hit their rear passenger side, and that was it.
Rachel heard Jon moan from her left. She felt herself slowly soak with blood and falling rain. There was no noise, no movement, nothing from behind her. Just nothing. And then Rachel had slept a long, unnatural sleep.
Rachel emerged from her memories to find herself standing in the church yard. Class was now somehow over. She’d rolled up her yoga mat and left the building without knowing she had done it. And now she was standing like an idiot in the middle of a field of spotty, browned grass with lawn sprinklers soaking her shoes.
Rachel, instinctively embarrassed, glanced around the yard. Was someone watching her getting soaked? Her car was the only one left in the lot. The only person she saw was the stranger with the hideous workout pants. He was walking down the road away from the church.
Rachel walked to her car and sank back into her memories.
When she was next aware of her location she was sitting in a burrito restaurant a mile and a half from her church. She was chewing and watching a little girl at the next table.
The girl was a six-year-old with lawless curly hair and freckles. She was enjoying what she was eating. Her whole body bounced from side to side in time with her chewing. When she spoke to her mother, her voice was far too loud and full of food. She begged her mother for sopapillas after the burritos were done.
The girl's mother just let the girl go on and on with her antics. The mom didn't shush her or still her. Rachel guessed the mom was simply sitting back in mild awe at the wonderful riot of life happening within her daughter, and letting the holy riot rage on in its peculiar beauty.
Rachel admired the mom for her reserve. Rachel had always been poor with such things when it came to Perity. Now that Perity was gone, Rachel found herself wondering why she’d parented like that. Why had she quieted down her daughter's voice so often? Why had she pushed a middle-age person's table manners on Perity with something only a stone's throw from mild fascism?
Rachel figured it was because she herself had always been self-aware, self-conscious, and self-analytical to the point of agony. Perity, in the glory of her childhood, had not been.
She’d pushed table manners on Perity, as she had said more than once to other mothers, as a way of making Perity prepared for life, a life where people would no longer forgive your inappropriateness because of your preschool cuteness. And so, if Rachel needed to drain away a little of Perity's intensity for life to impart this gift, then it was worth it, at least in the long term, which is the only term that really matters to mature, good, adult folk.
But that was all a lie. Playing it out in her mind now, Rachel knew deep-down she had been jealous of her daughter's freedom and self-forgetfulness. “How sick,” Rachel thought. “How fucking sick.” Then, as if someone else had said it, she nodded in agreement.
There hadn't been a long term for Perity anyway, and so even this pathetic rationalization, this sacrifice on the altar of a false god, no longer had even a whisper of sense to commend it. Why drip away a little of her daughter's force of life if the whole of that force could suddenly be drained onto the pavement in the span of a few seconds?
The dancing, chewing girl and her mom stood up, purchased a bag of sopapillas, and left. Rachel looked down at the brushed metal of her own table, and did not look up again until she had finished her chewing and her swallowing.
In a way, Perity's death had relieved Rachel of some of her obsession with self-consciousness. When you daughter is dead, you don't really give a crap if someone finds your voice too loud or your hair too dirty. That had been the effect on Rachel for at least most of the time since the accident.
Yet there were limits. Rachel would never allow herself to become one of those grieving moms who doesn’t put on makeup and lets her armpit hair grow out because, after all, who gives a fuck anymore. She was too profoundly vain for that. But Rachel was different now. There was no doubt about that.
With her lunch finished, Rachel spun in her chair to stand up and leave. As she rose, she found herself immediately nose to groin with the workout pants from the yoga class. The shock of it forced a little, quiet shriek from her. Rachel fell back in her seat.
"So sorry," said a voice from above the striped crotch. "So sorry."
The man in the pants chuckled. "I have always had the oddest and most unintentional habit of sneaking up on people. Even as a child, Mommy told me that in a former life I must have been a cat-burglar or a secret agent. So sorry."
A hand broke into Rachel's view. She shook it and looked up into his face.
The face said, "Wendell."
"Rachel."
"It's a pleasure, Rachel. A pleasure. And good fortune for me, I hope."
"What do you mean?" Rachel asked.
"I saw you across the restaurant and recognized you from the yoga class this morning."
"I recognize you too, Wendell. Your pants are a bit unforgettable."
"Oh indeed! Indeed. You may not believe this, but I have had these for over 20 years. Mommy told me that if a piece of clothing still fits and keeps the sun off, you should honor it by wearing it despite what the fickle gods of fashion might say. I am proud to say that though my waist may be two decades older, it is no less trim. And though the fabric may be a bit thin...."
"Wendell, I'm sorry. I must have interrupted your train of thought somehow. You were saying seeing me here was fortunate for you."
"Oh, of course! Of course," Wendell said. "You see, it appears my friend forgot to pick me up as she had promised to do. I walked here from the church, but I am not looking forward to the remaining three miles to my house. Yet, perhaps it is a blessing. For just such a misfortune will help me keep my waste trim and, therefore, these fine pants in service."
“Wendell, can I let you use my phone to call your friend?”
“Thanks, but no. My friend does not believe in cellular phones.”
For some reason Rachel decided to ignore the fact this made no sense.
"Ok. Well, then, can I give you a ride home, Wendell?"
"Oh, wow! WOW!" Wendell said, but then he hesitated. "But, I couldn't ask such a thing. I am a man and you are a woman and we do not know each other and such a situation would be a risky proposition for you."
"Oh, it's fine. I'm not worried. I don't care. I'll give you a ride." And, really, Rachel didn't care. She really didn't. Wendell appeared to have the musculature of a stork. One beer looked like it would get him drunk and two beers set him up for a furious hangover. If need be, she could take him down and probably not break a nail.
But she wouldn't have been worried even if Wendell would have been Mike Tyson, complete with the facial tattoo and the rape conviction. Not caring about such things anymore was just where she was. It might be where she’d always remain. Unlike her vanity, Rachel’s tendency toward self-preservation had been disabled by Perity’s death.
"Goodness!” Wendell said. “That is just fantastic. Top-notch! Whenever you’re ready. I don’t mind twiddling my thumbs a bit."
"My pleasure. Let's go right now." Rachel said this as she stood up and grabbed her purse from the table. Just because she was going to give Wendell a ride didn't mean she wanted a longer experience than was necessary. Rachel had more thinking to do, more memories into which to recline her mind.
They walked to the parking lot and approached Rachel's vehicle from the rear. As they reached it, Rachel started to dig in her purse for her keys. While she did, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Wendell stood studying her stick figure family on the rear windshield.
"My word, these are marvelous," he said. "How phenomenally witty. Your family as stick figures. Marvelous!"
Had he really never seen these things before? When Rachel drove through Mexican parts of town, it seemed every other car had them. Had he not seen all the riffs on the idea, especially the ones with the Mickey Mouse hats? Really?
"So," Wendell said. "You have two children. What are their names?"
Rachel dropped her keys. She picked them up, hit the unlock button, and moved to the driver side. All the while she pretended not to have heard him. This was a moment of truth. What would she say to a stranger? She got into the car. So did Wendell. Maybe he would move on and forget the question.
“Take a right out of the parking lot,” he said. Rachel started the car and followed his wishes.
She sighed with relief.
Once they turned into traffic, Wendell said, “So, what are your kids’ names?”
Rachel started talking just to see what she would say. "My son is named Stephen. My daughter is named Perity. Stephen is ten. Perity is six."
"Perity? I've never heard that one before. How did you come up with it?"
Rachel just went with it. It was a question she’d answered many times. “OK. I was a couple of months pregnant with her, and I was sick, sick, sick. Late one night during my first trimester, I got my husband to take me on a mercy run to the store. You know, to pick up the normal stuff designed to keep you from retching all over the house – saltines, Sprite, that pink goop.”
“Pepto!” Wendell said with great enthusiasm.
“Yes, Pepto-Bismol. Anyway, we pulled into the Walgreen’s parking lot. I noticed the store shared the lot with a bank. The bank was called Prosperity Bank. But, the P-R-O and S were burned out. Just “perity” was lit up. Jon and I had been fighting about what to name a girl if we had one. Well, not fighting really.”
“You and your husband had not come to an accord,” Wendell offered.
“Yep. But, there it was before us, a sign in lights. Perity. I pointed it out to John, and he went with it all the way. It was a very sweet, blessed moment, actually, but….”
Wendell broke in. “But what?” he said.
“But, I think as Perity gets older she might become frustrated with the name. It’s so weird, so out there, and the story of its origin might sound corny to her when she gets older. So we gave her Renee as a middle name. A safe option, should she ever need to exercise it.”
Wendell seemed to take in her story attentively, but Rachel didn't think he noticed her shaking by the end of its telling. The lie of the present tense had left Rachel feeling both exhilarated and weak.
If he’d noticed, he certainly didn’t comment. "Since you have told me a personal story, I’ll reciprocate."
Wendell didn't wait for Rachel to give him permission. "I have always been so aware of how the Lord has been active in details of my life. Just a little example: last week I was eating at The Cracker Barrel. I’d ordered this fried chicken tender meal. There were five tenders. When I cut into the last one, I saw it was raw. Raw! I’d already eaten four of the little buggers, and they’d been fine.
“By this point, I’d eaten almost all of my okra and my potatoes. I told my server. Showed her. And she brought me back a whole new plate. Five new tenders. Two new sides. Remarkable! But it gets better.
“Now, Rachel, you see, I went left to right on the tenders because I’m left-handed. It just felt like the natural thing to do. If I’d a been a righty and ate from the other direction, I’d have hit the raw tender first and missed my blessing. The Lord is good, Rachel. Take a right at the next street.”
As she complied with a right turn, Rachel sat there stumped for a few seconds. She was a little queasy. Then Rachel said, “Wendell, I remember a time in my life when I really hated my job. And I was wrestling with the whole ‘do I stay or do I go’ thing. So, I walked into a dollar store to get some snacks and decided to buy a reusable grocery bag. Every flipping bag they had said ‘Bloom Where You’re Planted’ on it. So, I figured that was my sign.
“Then I went to lunch at a Chinese place. My fortune cookie said, ‘It is time for you to journey to new shores.’ I mean, really? Which is it, Mr. All-Powerful Happenstance?” Rachel’s tone was rougher than she wanted, but she couldn’t control it, couldn’t tamp it down.
Wendell just picked things up again. He seemed oblivious to Rachel’s tone, to her words, to her death grip on the steering wheel.
He said, “Anyway, the chicken tender story is not the one I really want to tell you. Here it is: My first wife – God rest her soul – and I were strawberry farmers way back before you were born. This one week we were just flooded by orders. It was a Sunday evening and everyone was coming Monday to pick up their berries.
“As the sun was setting, I walked out into the fields, and all I saw was green. Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t imagining the green of money. I was looking at green, unripe, unpalatable, unsellable strawberries. So, right out there in the field I said, ‘Lord, I need a little help. Lord, come and touch my berries. Do me a kindness and touch my little berries, Jesus. Make my berries red, Lord.”
Rachel thought Wendell’s prayer had been, to put it mildly, oddly phrased. She broke in. “You definitely don’t want that phrase taken out of context, Wendell.”
Wendell didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss. He just plowed forward. “Then my wife and I went to sleep, and we slept like babies. I woke up the next morning a little before sunrise. In fact, I greeted the sun in the same spot where I’d prayed the night before. And the field was red. All red. Everywhere. The berries had all been touched overnight. Ripened.
“I went out to pick and my wife started packing and distributing them to the folks as they pulled up. By 10am she was shouting, ‘Wenny! Wenny, baby! Don’t pick anymore. We’ve got enough. The orders are full.’
“Well, there was still a sea of red out there, Rachel, and you can’t waste berries like that, it’s just not right, so I went back to my spot, and I prayed some more: ‘Lord, you gave us a lot of berries. You must have had a plan for all those berries. What do you want to do now, Lord?’
“And then it was amazing. It was like that old Kevin Costner movie with the baseball diamond in the cornfield. Field of Dreams is the name, I think. Every car on the main road just started turning off. My wife and I picked and sold all day. We were filling pillowcases by the end of it. We’d run out of baskets, you see.”
Throughout the telling Wendell had been interjecting “lefts” and “rights” to direct Rachel to his house. Now they’d arrived. She pulled into his driveway. Her queasiness had deepened, strengthened, and spread. She feared she was going to be ill. She tried to hide it, to just get the ride over with.
Wendell turned to Rachel and shook her hand. “Goodness, Rachel, you feel cold!” Then he moved on. “I am so very thankful the Lord has put you in my path today, Rachel. Thank you for doing me this kindness. God has worked through you. Mommy always said the highest calling in all the world was simply to be a mirror. A mirror to reflect the Lord’s love to others. You are a windexed mirror, Rachel. Clean indeed!”
Wendell smiled, opened the door, and exited. Rachel watched the workout pants start the trek up the front walk. She should have waited to see if Wendell got inside successfully, but Rachel couldn’t wait. She needed to go.
She backed out of the driveway and followed Wendell’s curving street for half a mile until she reached her first turn. Then she stopped at the intersection and froze. Rachel couldn’t remember having been there before. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to turn left or right. Rachel strained her mind trying to figure out what to do next, and she felt like a drunk battling to get a key in a lock. The signs didn’t look familiar, and she’d totally forgotten that her cellphone lived to help with such dilemmas. Rachel felt her chest constrict again, and a ripple of panic moved across her flesh. She tried to focus, to clear her mind, to even her breathing, to pray her prayers.
But all Rachel could think of, all her mind could reckon, were images, images of convertibles filled with strawberries and pillowcases stuffed with hail. Someone honked behind her, and Rachel mindlessly waved them around. Then she did it for another car. And then a third. And then a fourth.