A Notion of Pelicans Read online

  He said, “Don’t you?”

  I did, but wasn’t about to say so. I looked up and stared him down. “I did do something. I devoted myself to getting you where you are.”

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even accurate. Funny how we do that, when it suits. I laid out my life’s plan as much out of fear as out of love. Romanticizing graduate school was one thing, but when it came down to the actuality of it—real people, making demands—I choked. Over the years I’ve learned not to dwell on things spoken during low moments, and fortunately, Richard does the same. Otherwise our marriage might have ended up long ago where a lot of clergy marriages end—in front of a judge.

  We were an unlikely pair. I guess I’m more like my parents than I care to think. Religious life was the farthest thing from my mind, and Richard ended up, as he likes to put it, at a kegger he wouldn’t have gone to except he was dragged by his housemate. They walked in and found an elf dancing on a coffee table, long-haired, blonde, grooving to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” It was me. I wasn’t inebriated, mind you, not that night. Just exuberant. I was singing at the top of my lungs and kicking my legs up, chorus-girl style. Richard says there was something fetching about it, about me. I don’t know—maybe he sought me out instinctively, some part of him needing to loosen up. Maybe I found myself drawn to him because of a spiritual side that was starved. Maybe we were just in the right place at the right time. Who can say how they ended up with the partner they did? All I know is we fell in love—the Lunatic sense-of-humor at work.

  We were juniors when we met. I’d crossed the border freshman year, to the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. It was the perfect place—secular enough to please my mom, radical enough to please me. Richard transferred in two years later, starting out at a small campus close to home. By the time he walked into that party—with his short crop of black hair, his averted, wine-dark eyes—I’d been, as they say, around the block. A couple of times. The first encounter I hadn’t planned, exactly. I just sort of fell out of the gondola—the guy was older and an operator, and when it was over I felt as much relief as anything. The second, with someone I’d really lusted after, was more deliberate on my part. It lasted longer, and the breakup was harder to take.

  While neither relationship ended very well, they’d been instructive. My sex education at home amounted to my mother handing me a small, yellow book with a chicken on the cover. Hens and roosters, a variation on the birds and the bees. Those first relationships were important—they filled in some big gaps. With AIDS and all, I wouldn’t want to be looking for a partner now, but back then everything seemed so simple. Even sex. There’s nothing simple about it, of course. But we were the last generation that had the privilege of being young and stupid in a less dangerous time.

  When I got to Madison, I went to a clinic and got on the Pill. I wasn’t plotting the life of a trollop. I just wanted to be prepared. I’d even managed to convince myself Mom had given her permission. She had, sort of. “For God’s sake,” she said the day I left, “don’t get knocked up. Your father would make you marry the bum.”

  I blushed. I was so backwards about my sexuality, I’d used a mirror to figure out where the Tampax should go. The thought of anything bigger being welcomed into that tight place seemed unlikely. But even after I found out what a kick lovemaking was, and how much I liked it, I had no intention of settling down— not for the foreseeable future, at any rate—and I figured when I did, it would be with some guy just like me. Someone hip. Someone dangerous. Someone foaming at the belt.

  Then I met Richard.

  He was awfully cute, and even better, not of a disposition to pound on a door. But what a square, what a milk beard, what a babe in the bush.

  What a challenge.

  If life made any sense, he should have ended up with Toni, who was my roommate, but they were too alike to want one another. Toni was red-haired with creamy skin and looked like she’d just left puberty. She was also nine-tenths brain and about as uptight. She and Richard, when I first met him, were the only people on campus who could make Lincoln stand up. Not the real Lincoln, of course, but a statue, one with resolve on its face to make you teary. He’s seated at the top of Bascom Hill, and if a virgin passes by, he’ll give them a nod, lifting his creaking bones out of the chair.

  Our first week rooming together, I hauled Toni into a lingerie shop. She stood staring into the dressing room mirror at the minimalist bra I was trying on. “You’d wear something that small?” she squeaked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I’m actually thinking of giving bras up. Any together woman would.” The look on her face was priceless.

  Toni’s another example of the divine law of opposites attracting. The whole time we were roommates, she wouldn’t get it on with a guy to save her life. She blanched when I brought home a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I, on the other hand, was all about guys. But that didn’t stop us from wearing our hair the same—close as we could get, anyway—walking the same, talking the same. We began to think the same. Oh, and bleed the same. We were so psyched when our cycles merged. Even today, I’ll hear myself say something and think, That’s Toni in my head. Back then, she hadn’t come fully into herself yet— she’s got an odd sense of humor and a taste for the quick retort—but she already had her offbeat quirkiness. After Madison, we managed to stay in touch, or rather, I did, when she wasn’t in one of her work frenzies and would answer the phone. Toni’s the reason we came to Pelican. She called out of the blue one day, by then a big-shot professor. I answered, we chatted, and then she said, “Hey . . . I don’t know what’s up with you two, but . . . my church is looking for a pastor. I know Richard would be great, and it would be nice, having the two of you around. You interested?”

  As roommates, we did everything together. Well, not everything. I obviously didn’t take her on my amours. But when I was first seeing Richard, it was always in a group and she’d tag along. There were ice cream runs to Bascom Hall, nights of hot fudge pound cake sundaes at a little place on State Street. We owned a pew at a smoky bar next to the stadium, where we downed pitchers and ate brats to the music of folk guitar. Toni was a hoot—she’d get a little tanked and start to sing along. Richard would egg her on. “Thatta girl. Belt it out.” I didn’t know who was cuter. She didn’t always go along, of course, and it was on one of those days—a warm September afternoon when it was just Richard and me, watching boats sail past the Union Terrace—that he finally held my hand. Both hands, actually, fingers clasped around plastic cups of beer.

  Those first days were almost a religious experience, Richard and I playing dual roles. Initiate and priest. He opened me to the mystery of God, I opened him to that of sex. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go to church with him and roll to the floor gifted with tongues. My spiritual journey has been a gradual one, with occasional kinks in the road. I simply sat and took everything in—from the architectural beauty of the building to the smallest of things. The bowl of hyacinths on the altar, the candles with their hopeful flames, the rows of numbers crisp and squat and ordinary on the hymn board above the pulpit. I tried to look with Richard’s eyes and my father’s heart. Something had kept Pops going to Mass all those years, and I wanted to know what it was.

  Richard came to sex the way Jacob met the Angel. He wrestled with it. Our first kiss didn’t happen for over a month after we were holding hands. While I waited, old-fashioned enough to want him to make the move, I lamented to Toni daily. “Is something wrong with me? Am I too thin? too fat? Should I perm my hair?”

  The day I said that, she was lying across her desk, one arm lost in her natural curls, her nose nearly touching the pages of a textbook. She sat up long enough to shoot me a come off it look, then fell right back into the book.

  I threw myself across the room onto her bed. “You think he’s gay?”

  “He’s gay.” She didn’t even look up.

  “He’s not. Toni. I’m trying to have a conversation here.” She still didn’t look at me—she
was studiously indifferent. “Toni,” I said. “I need you here. I don’t want to waste time on someone who’s never going to make the time I invested not a waste.”

  “Excuse me? Will you listen to yourself? A little rich girl whining about only having a Ferrari.”

  “Oh, I see, and you’re the truly poor girl? Well, I’m dying here, and I get piss-ass nothing from you.” I rolled off her bed and, on the way to mine, turned on the TV. “You wait,” I said. “Someday you’ll find out.”

  It wasn’t one of our happier moments, but we survived it, and the instigating problem resolved itself without anyone’s help or advice. Richard finally gave in, and the kiss was pure heaven. From there, we moved in excruciating increments. Torsos meshed in a slow, slow waltz, his hands making captives of my breasts right through the layers of my clothes, our cut-off-clad legs twined together on a blanket in the sun, the skin of our thighs heated, active, perspiring. We inched forward, inched back, leapt forward, leapt back, until we’d worked ourselves to a pitch.

  I wish, sometimes, we could go back to those days. Sex between us now is steadier, if rarer, the familiar drift and drizzle of tide on an ocean beach. That, too, has much to recommend it, but there are days when I yearn for that first vibrant intimacy, when each look, each touch, is an experience. Our bodies seemed more than they were, somehow. Sacred, almost.

  No one had ever made me feel the way Richard did.

  The first time he unhooked my bra—and he was all thumbs, so sweet—when it fell from my breasts, he inhaled sharply. “You’re so beautiful.” The way he said it, half in awe, half in pain, it was as if he were standing on holy ground, as if he’d breached the Temple veil. When we finally made love completely, one afternoon in the deep of January, we were bonded emotionally beyond the point of return.

  Richard anguished so over sex, when he proposed on Valentine’s Day, I took pity. I said, “Yes.”

  Toni seemed upset. She thought we were nuts and didn’t mind telling me. “Have you flipped out? Rena, this isn’t you.”

  “It’s me now,” I said.

  We scheduled the wedding for June and spent the months in between in a dream. I’d never been happier. In fact, they were the happiest days of my life. Richard and I weren’t burdened with the weight of life, yet we had promised to be. We were taking the steps toward growing up.

  My only regret was Toni.

  I had to pull away from her some, which gave me guilt. I’d made the mistake in the beginning of letting her rely on me too much. Her social life revolved around me, and I could see her alternately mirroring and needing me. I was so in love—and she couldn’t comprehend it. I think she resented it. I’d get this attitude from her whenever I’d get back from having been with Richard.

  I was the most worried about her one Sunday morning just before school ended. I’d gone away for the weekend to a friend’s baby shower, and I was so miserable away from Richard, that I came back early, before breakfast. He was sharing the top floor of a house, and I stopped at the dorm to get some books I needed before I drove over and slipped into bed with him.

  I figured Toni would be awake and gone. She loved Sunday mornings—she’d go out and walk the deserted campus like some earth sprite, smelling the air, sipping an extra large coffee she’d picked up from the Union. I stuck the key in the lock—and found the door unlocked. It gave me a start. I pushed it open and the smell of a brewery wafted out, along with a strong smell of vomit. The room was barely lit, the curtains drawn. I could see Toni humped up facedown in her blankets, except for one arm, which was draped over a trashcan that waited next to the bed like a dutiful black dog. “Toni?” I said.

  She groaned, raised the arm to wave me off, and groaned again.

  “Toni. What happened? What on earth? Are you all right?”

  She brought both arms up to cover her head, moaned, and mumbled into her pillow. My eyes had adjusted, and I could see there was puke on the sleeves of her PJs, and clothes strewn everywhere. It looked like she’d emptied her closet and dumped every drawer. I said, “What did you say? I can’t understand you.” I sat on the edge of her bed, put my hand on the small of her back. “Toni. What is this? You need to talk to me.”

  She half rolled and swatted at my hand like she’d swat at a horsefly. “Don’t . . . you, with your . . . your . . . You’re the last, the last person . . . I want to talk to.” She flung back down and covered her head with her pillow. “Just . . . go . . . away.”

  I never got to Richard’s. I couldn’t leave Toni in that condition. I sat on my bed in the dark until she agreed to get up, then I dragged her out to put something in her stomach. She turned less green as the hours passed. If she hadn’t been so pathetic, it would have been funny. I mean, Toni, puking in a garbage can. All I could get from her was that she’d gone to a campus showing of The Wizard of Oz, run into some friends of her cousin’s, and had too much cheap apple wine. I’d never seen such spit in her—it was like I was seeing a doppelgänger. And it stayed. There was something different about her after that.

  Richard and I managed to get to our wedding day without any serious cold feet. After the wedding, we moved into a tiny efficiency apartment. It had one large window that opened onto State Street, and through it the smells of pizza and falafel drifted up and in—along with the din and diesel fumes of buses air-braking to a stop below.

  We were happy there. We slept in an old Murphy bed that we stood on end every morning and swung into the closet. Richard watched, incredulous, the first time I went through my Capshawnian leaving-the-house ritual. “What are you doing?” he said as I unplugged the iron, the coffee pot, the lamp with the frayed cord. “Didn’t you just do that?” he said when, having checked the burners on the stove, I went back and checked them again. It lost its charm, he said, about the second week.

  What I learned that year was that I’d married the world’s most fastidious young man. “Rena,” I heard more often than I could count, “could you put your shoes away?” After twenty years, and three kids, we’re pretty much the same. I still leave my shoes wherever I stepped out of them, and Richard still can get me back by pulling last week’s leftovers out with a look of tribulation on his face. “Sweetie,” he’ll say, and I know what’s coming just by the expression on his face. “Could we come up with some orderly plan for putting things in the fridge? Hmmm?” It makes me wonder if Lavinia wasn’t fudging a bit, when she spoke of her marriage as if it were made in Heaven.

  Lavinia. Did I mention that Richard tells me I have a tendency to digress? By the time I left the cemetery this morning, it was 10:15—time to make my slide into hell. I gave the mums a last arranging, wished Lavinia a happy birthday, and continued to the church. Life as a pastor’s wife provides me no salary but compensates by way of hundreds of tasks. I washed my hands and stepped into the office to drop off an article that the church secretary, Amber, had reminded me I was supposed to write for the newsletter. I was leaning over her desk, interpreting my handwriting and explaining all the arrows, when the door to Richard’s office opened.

  I wished it hadn’t.

  Framed in the doorway, backlit by the window, were he and Claire Collier, and they were laughing, entirely too agreeably. The woman makes my blood pressure rise. She’s young, pretty. I knew it must have been the end of a counseling session, and I tried not to look—Richard’s a stickler about confidentiality. But I’ve got eyes. Any woman who’s being honest will admit that other women sometimes scare her. This one scares me. She’s going through a divorce, so the counseling is legitimate, I guess. But she’s a strikingly noticeable girl—in a more primitive era, she might have worn a long bow and one breast—and she doesn’t say a lot, especially around the ladies. She came to our fellowship gathering, once, and just sat there, watching, from under that dark sweep of bangs. It gave you the feeling she could be sitting on a powder keg. I do know this—she’s part of a theater group in town that’s famous for its actors’ changing partners as often as they change scripts. />
  “You’re flinging boulders again,” Richard says. “For the love of Pete, take a look at yourself, yes, at yourself, and dredge up some compassion. People’s lives are complicated.”

  Amber’s eyes moved from me, to Claire, to Richard. I thought, What’s she thinking? When Claire noticed me, her lips turned up into an odd almost-smile. There was something forlorn about it, and I could only wonder what it meant. But Richard’s reaction needed no interpretation. When he saw me, he did a good imitation of Penelope, our lab, when she’s pulled the bread bag off the counter again and you know from the look on her face she’s been up to something before you even find the crumbs.

  “Rena,” he said. “Have a nice time with Lavinia?”

  “Yes, thank you. Lavinia’s well.”

  Richard rolled his eyes towards Claire. He said, “We can’t keep her out of the cemetery.”

  “Better than trying to put her there,” she quipped.

  They all laughed—I managed a smile—and Claire said murder was on her mind. She’s in a show right now where she’s playing the sister of a very wealthy woman with a very new husband. “I don’t want to give the plot away,” she said, “but things aren’t right with the couple—someone’s out to knock someone else off.”

  Small wonder, I thought.

  Claire smiled again, a full-out smile. I hate to admit, but it was like a flower opened. She said, “It’s a fun play, a modern take on Shakespeare, a little Sherlock Holmes. There are secret passageways and howling mastiffs, a full moon and mixed-up identities. Curtain’s at eight. I hope you’ll all come?”

  Richard smiled. The room was smiles, smiles. About when I thought I’d puke, he said, “We’ll see. Just a minute, Claire. I’ll walk out with you.” He went into his office, reappeared, and handed his appointment book to Amber with a businesslike “I’ll be at the parsonage, maybe an hour or so.” To me, he said, “See you at home.”