Part 27 (2/2)

What? I say What's the matter?

Dan does know karate, Dev says

Do you know, I say, ould happen to Dan if you hit him full-on?

What? Dev says

He'd topple like a pine He's a pipsqueak of a thing You've got a leg as big as Dan

Dev grins all over his face He says, Really?

Absolutely Karate or no karate You're twice his size

He's out the door when he turns and hollers back, You swear I won't get in trouble?

If you hit first, you've lost TV for aoff his backpack He'd run for about a block before turning to face the pack Dan had said he was gonna karate Dev's block off, and Dev had said, You go ahead and hit onna topple like a pine

End of discussion

Co for a solution to our transportation woes, a professor I've hto Italy and heard I needed a car Maybe I could keep hers through the summer; she'd consider it a favor

And that's how hard that was Such unearned gifts feed the growing faith that so when I take out the fourth credit card I can't pay-one with a five-hundred-dollar lie interest rate That sa profs to New York for a program fund-raiser

Once the dinner's over, the writers cross the street to the Pierre Hotel to hang out With its checkerboard floor and ornate arht Toby and his pals sing in loud har side to side like a grade-school choir

I' ent from almost a year back Where, she says with both charm and entitlement, is my damn memoir?

I'm shocked she remembered me and even more shocked when I hear myself tell her the truth: I'm in the middle of a divorce and haven't done that es

She says, Send et you an advance

Here's where grace co, I would've pretended to knohat a proposal was, then lived in crouched fear,too afraid inform to fail at a proposal Instead, I hearabout writing a proposal

She waves her hand like it's the easiest thing in the world, saying, Maybe a hundred pages Three or four chapters

In a poet's es sounds like two thousand I haven't published a hundred pages in twenty years

How long do you think, she asks, before I can get those chapters?

My head's scraoes to stay with his dad mid-June, I'll have a month to work, so I say, Mid-July

Great, she says Then just add a letter saying what else you ht put in the book

I must have a stunned look on my face

I'll call you Monday, she says, and walk you through it

To write the stuff down is no cakewalk, since et ho to set doords before Dev co the phone and apply my ass to a desk chair So es with Mother and our whole wacky herd

ConsSaturday, has an auction that week, and a few days later-while I'ht envelope with payment hit my porch

In the stea it before I even throw pasta in the bubbly water It's in no way a est I've ever seen, and it's fallen froh the su a down pay thanks to the invisible forces that brought it, I sit looking at the check On the table before rass and crickets The bent-legged bugs are whirring to fill the roolass Dev bursts in, saying, Moht And I tell hi

39

God Shopping Lord, Youfor sonorantHe likes to standat the screen door, callingoggie, oggie, enteringlanguage, and so will stop and come upthe walk, perhapsaccidentally May he believethis is not an accident?At the screen,welco each beastin love's name, Your emissary-Louise Gluck, ”The Gift”

If you'd told ular that I'd wind up whisperingthe rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed More likely pasti el with a sht, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajao to church

I barely look up Despite us Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was-as I've said before-no more able to co religion the opiate of theDev why he wants to go to church, I'm confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll But he says: to see if God's there to see if God's there

The phrase straightens my slouchy spine Some native faith lets him stare out theat the aluminum sky and see a scri up a sober Episcopalian (an oxyoes to church If I'd had a pal attending a one there

So disinterested am I, so devoid of curiosity, that I cli a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pass tiht out of some horror-movie castle It sits a projects on the other Soon as the engine dies, Dev bolts for the huge oak doors, his loafers slapping up the leaf-strealk He has on a hand-reen clip-on bow tie, he looks like so in makes me a little watery

In the foyer, I expect to find soress, the woloves and ear bobs, thetips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cucumber that makes white people look so seedy But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on episode in progress, the woloves and ear bobs, thetips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cucumber that makes white people look so seedy But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on

Organ music starts in the sanctuary, and we drift into a barnlike structure with tall stained glass here saints I don't know are doing saintly things I can't figure out We stand and sit and pray for over an hour People take turns talking at the granite altar Dev belts out hyes Afterward, people eat pastries in the foyer Kids streak around A few parents fros me coffee like I like

This uninvited niceness see for them to ask me for money In the car, I ask Dev whether God was there, expecting him to be as cynical as I a, Where were you you?

We stop going to the Episcopal church after a feeeks because I find it too cold-not emotionally but physically To heat that vaulted space would cost a fortune, I guess Still, the scalding baths I take to get blood back into my feet after service feel like penance