She lifted out the plastic spoon, the wax paper baggy of soy sauce and fortune cookies, then the warm white carton, and undid the flaps. Thin strips of beef and red pepper floated in a brown curry sauce. He stared at her, as if she'd cast a spell over him.
“You like it?” he asked, and when she looked up to nod, his eyes were wild and grateful as a stray dog's and she realized all this was happening because he was very drunk.
One spoonful followed another. She ate as fast as she could, afraid the food would be ripped away. The curry was strong, with lots of gooey gravy. When it was gone, she ran her finger along the sides of the carton, then licked the warm sauce from the tips.
Still he stared at her with his fishy eyes. He reached across and put his hand on her bare knee. She looked at the hairy knuckles, the sapphire ring. He was dressed in a colorless shirt made of thick white cotton and a pair of khakis.
She asked if he was going to tie her up again. Things were so much more certain that way. His expression, which she'd catalogued as hopeful, even friendly, turned sharp and he smiled stiffly, called her a stupid bitch, and with the heel of his shoe he kicked out at her. She was so surprised she lost her balance and fell off the bed. Quickly she righted herself, crawled underneath the bedspread, but he grabbed her by the ankle and yanked so her face slammed into the nylon carpet and he flung himself down, strode her chest, like she'd do to her brother when she'd won a fight. He pinned her hands under his knees as she bucked up a few times, arched her back, tried to get him off, but the troll just smiled, reached around for his wallet. It was Western style, with roses stamped into the leather. He flipped it open, took out a piece of paper, and unfolded it. His birth certificate, worn fuzzy on the edges, the typed information fading out.
“See,” he held it up to her, “it doesn't matter whether you have a girlfriend or not.” Sandy felt herself trembling. It was worse than she thought. The man was completely insane.
He got off her. Sandy felt her chest expand with air.
“Stand up.” He yanked her up, his hands on her hips, then tripped her down onto the bed. With one hand he clenched the pee-heavy diaper so the tapes broke, and he threw it against the nightstand, where it fell wet and lumpy behind the bed. Brown sauce spurted up her throat and the sun flared out; tendrils of fire ignited the clouds, violet and bloody blue-red. Fire fell like rain, the trees hissed and smoldered, branches full of dry leaves flared up. If she let him do it this time, the whole world would come to an end. Using the muscles in her upper legs and her knees to push off, she lunged forward and out of his palms’ grip. Her hand was on the chain, the other twisting the doorknob, and she was out. The sweet humid air tasted of car exhaust; white lights and red ones blurred on the elevated highway. Pebbles stuck to the pads of her feet and the asphalt grated her skin; the cement supports were too tall to scale so she ran up the exit ramp and tried to wave down a car on the interstate.
Five: GINGER
It wasn't so bad in here since she'd brought a lamp from home, one of the colonial ones from the basement. Now the cement walls of the church office and her mother's huge green metal desk glowed as if the room were continuously held in the glittering palm of God. She pulled out the bottom drawer. It was filled with old stuff: an ancient jar of fountain-pen ink, colored pencils, a blue ball of rubber bands, a booklet of baby Jesus stickers and a plastic container of gold stars. Yellowed business cards with antiquated lettering were scattered on the bottom. Her mother used the stars to distinguish particularly good Sunday school drawings: the divine doves of adolescent girls or the bloody pictures the older boys drew of Jesus on the cross.
She thought of the old church downtown: plywood nailed over the cracked stained glass and red graffiti tags sprayed over the fieldstone. Stuffed animals dangled from the bushes and trees outside: teddy bears caked with dirt, some missing eyes, and a few naked dolls, noosed like tiny babies with disconcertingly cheerful expressions and hacked-off hair. Across the street, the X-rated theater looked on with sly mastery. Before the church was vacated, crack heads forced open the back door and stole the antique silver communion chalice. The fiends, as her father referred to them, left a dead rat on the altar and with red lipstick wrote fuck you in the margin of the big leather Bible. Together they spent several days cleaning up. Her father used a broom to push the furry body across the marble, over the altar's edge into a paper bag. With a damp washcloth she'd wiped away the swear words, leaving a blotchy red stain over most of the Book of Isaiah. Mulhoffer had been smug about the break-in; her father was crestfallen and contrite. He still hoped to convince the congregation to keep the old building, turn it into a soup kitchen or a shelter for homeless men.
She peeled the label off a wax paper computer strip and stuck it onto a flier that reminded parishioners membership photos would be taken in two weeks. Already she'd folded and stapled hundreds of them and was almost done with the labels. Encoded in the names was secret information, confided by her father to her about people in the parish. Mrs. Hofner, who told everyone her husband died of a heart attack, had actually nudged an electric radio into his hot bath; or the Koenigs, whose eldest son hung himself in the backyard wearing his sister's prom dress and the Robertson newlyweds, who got involved with cocaine and kinky sex and were still in a detox center in West Virginia. Then there were the more mundane confessions, the loneliness of the older members, the disappointments of middle-aged ones. Sometimes her father saw people in his home office and Ginger would put her ear to the door, listen to a woman complain about her wayward husband and a mother tell how she'd forced her teenage daughter onto the pill.
Her father was away on Monday making sick calls. First he did the shut-ins, the handful of elderly Germans living in apartments downtown. He sometimes joked about the thick smell of sauerkraut embedded in their forties-style furniture and their knickknacks on pine shelves: dogs and elfish children in lederhosen. He always spent a full hour with Mrs. Mueller, who used to be the most powerful member of the church before Mulhoffer. She donated the money to buy the organ and made a special contribution every summer so the vacation Bible school kids could go to Holyland USA. Mrs. Mueller's grandfather started the glove factory, world famous for making long, elegant evening gloves of silk and satin and short pastel day gloves with pearl wrist buttons. Germans who fled the Third Reich were offered jobs in the factory, and this was how the church downtown got started. Though bedridden, Mrs. Mueller, a formidable lady responsible for both the expansion of the library and the new community theater building, still lived in an old Victorian on Main Street with a middle-aged nurse and a gardener who puttered around the lawn. Every visit Ginger's father gave her communion; he opened his black leather traveling case with the blue velvet indentations for the decanter of wine, the small chalice, a round tin that held the wafers stamped with lambs. He kept a lightweight tippet in his coat pocket, gold crosses embroidered on either end. Draping it around his neck, solemn as a melancholy magician, he offered up the cup to Mrs. Mueller's thrush-covered tongue, her white hair so thin that as she bowed her head, he could see blue veins through the translucent skin of her scalp.
Next he went to the Lutheran Home and held a lunchtime service. Organized in the makeshift chapel, a piece of red felt was thrown over a card table below a gold cross made by a resident out of Popsicle sticks. In wheelchairs and walkers they came, expressions ranging from reverence to resolve. Finally he ended the day with a drive over to the hospital, where he'd visit anyone the nurses said needed help. Last week he saw a boy whose face had been messed up in a fireworks accident and a woman who gave birth to a blind baby. He always looked in on the man with the goiter growing out of his neck and the diabetic woman who'd had her legs amputated just below the knees.