The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 3


Full Retreat





I want to share something with you,” Rick says over breakfast.

It’s a funny word, share. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. Ordinarily if somebody tells you they want to share with you, it means they have something nice and want you to have some too. In the Christian vernacular, it’s almost the opposite. To share means I’m going to impose on you, but it’s not me doing the imposing, really, it’s God. Therefore you have to sit there and take it. You have to go along with whatever I share.

The boys have gone to school and it’s just the two of us. Eli hitched a ride to school with Damon after extracting a promise from Rick to drop off his twisted tire at the bike shop. Now it sits in the mudroom, waiting.

During the night, Rick slipped back into bed, never mentioning that he’d been gone. But there is clearly a difference from the night before. The fraught sense of intimacy is gone. And he hasn’t said a word about Jim’s proposal. We’re at the table, bathed in morning light, staring into the dregs of our coffee. And now Rick wants to share.

I have to force myself to answer. “What is it, honey?”

On the table, the keys to Stacy’s beach house sit beside my half-eaten grapefruit. I close my fist around the floaty, dragging it down to my lap. As he talks, I find myself squeezing tightly.

“I stayed up late last night,” he says, “and did some serious soul-searching. This is such a big step, the job in Virginia. I have to be honest. I don’t know what to do. It would be such a change . . . but maybe a change is exactly what I need. I’m feeling stifled.”

“In ministry, you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “In life.”

“I see.”

“Now, don’t get angry.”

“Why would I be angry? You haven’t said anything we didn’t talk about last night.”

“You sound angry.”

“Do I?” I pause, trying to listen to the sound of my words, their echo in the room. “Well, I’m not trying to. Listen, we don’t have to get into this right now. Let’s take our time, okay? When we’re in Florida, away from Lutherville and the church and everything else, you can clear your mind and we can really figure this out. You don’t have to say yes or no right this second.”

“I know that,” he says, a defensive note in his voice.

“It’s just . . . I don’t think you need to do anything rash.”

“Beth, I’ve made a decision.”

“Oh.”

“Oh? That’s it?”

“It sounded like a statement, not a question.”

He pushes away from the table, splashes the last of his coffee into the sink. Lingering there, gazing through the window toward the shed, he lets out a sigh. I almost tell him about last night, how I interrupted his prayer vigil and caught him napping. Instead, I unclench my fist and put the beach house keys back on the table.

“Listen, Rick.”

“I’m not going,” he says.

I hear the words and weight lifts. As much as our life here can sometimes grate on me, I’m not ready to leave it, not yet. Maybe not ever. My house. My neighbors. My little niche in the world. I didn’t know how much I loved it until the prospect of leaving arose. Breaking the news to Kathie will be hard. The pressure of her hand on mine, telling me to keep an open mind, saying it would be like old times. But it wouldn’t. You can’t go back.

At the same time, there’s a flutter of doubt. Is this really me? Afraid to leave my familiar surroundings. Willing to live with a situation I can’t stand out of fear. He’s making the decision without me, though, so I don’t need to interrogate my feelings too deeply. It’s on Rick’s shoulders. Let it stay there.

“All right, then,” I say. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right choice.”

He turns and gives me the same inscrutable frown from last night. “No, Beth. I don’t know about the job yet. That’s up in the air. What I mean is, I’m not going to Florida.”

“What?”

“Take the boys if you want. Or go yourself if you want. Maybe you should. You could ask Stacy to go with you.”

“I don’t understand. You don’t want to go to Florida? Fine. We’ll go somewhere else. I don’t care. But we need to go, Rick. We need this time.”

“Not me,” he says.

“It’s your vacation!”

“Last night something happened. God laid something on my heart. I don’t know exactly what he was telling me, or what to do about it. But I know where I need to be if I want to hear him.”

“Where is that?”

“Out there,” he says, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.

“In the backyard?”

“In the shed.”

“You’re going to the shed so God can talk to you? Will you be back in time for lunch?”

He shakes his head slowly, smiling at my mockery. “Don’t, Beth. What I’m saying is, instead of some vacation, I’m going to spend that time with him.”

“The whole month of October.”

“If that’s how long it takes, then yes.”

“You’re going to live in the shed?” Acid floods into my veins. “Are you even listening to yourself? What are you going to do for food, huh? What if you need to go to the bathroom?”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t leave the shed ever. It’s not about legalism.”

Legalism, in this context, means having to follow rules invented by someone other than yourself. There’s no doubt in my mind this isn’t about that kind of legalism. Rick is definitely going to make up his own rules and not be bothered by anyone else’s.

“This is so selfish,” I say.

“That’s where you’re wrong. This is the most selfless thing I have ever done in my life.”

I’m not a throw-the-dishes kind of woman, but hearing those words, I can understand why they do it. He marches out, slamming the back door behind him, and part of me wishes I’d sent a bowl or coffee mug—one of the cheap ones—flying after him.

A few moments later I hear the shed door snap shut.





He’s gone temporarily crazy, that’s all. In an hour, he’ll emerge from the shed and make a joke of the whole thing. And I’ll make myself laugh. You had me going there for a while. Only an hour passes and he doesn’t come out. I make more coffee and take a mug outside.

At the door, I remember last night. I pour the coffee onto the grass and turn back.

Across the English garden, from the corner of my eye, I see a familiar figure emerge from the back of the big house. Deedee Smythe steps outside in a flowing white cover-up that opens to reveal an ecru one-piece bathing suit that must have been very chic when she bought it in the 1970s. Under one arm she carries a folding lawn chair, just like the Rent-a-Mob folks I met yesterday, and under the other she has a canvas and easel. When I first met Deedee, I thought she was a recreational watercolorist, one of those people who takes it up as a hobby. In fact, she’s a rather accomplished painter. Roy Meakin, one of the neighbors, filled me in on her illustrious career, and afterward I looked her up online. She’s the only person I know who has a Wikipedia entry.

Seeing me, Deedee raises her hand to wave. The cover-up slips down to reveal a long, bronzed arm. She is not the sort of lady whose age you ask, but as best I can work out, she’s in her mid- to late fifties. To hear Roy tell it, when she was younger all the men hovered around like bees at the honeycomb. She still carries herself that way. What I like about her, though, is how little care she seems to take. She dresses eccentrically, even badly, and never seems concerned about the impression she’s making. All she cares about is painting. And keeping her mother, Margaret, appeased.

“You’re out early this morning,” I call.

She beckons me over. “I had to get away from her. I was supposed to get her a Zagnut after mass yesterday, and it utterly slipped my mind. To add insult to injury, I made the mistake of letting her know that, at her age, maybe it was time to cut back on the sweets. You know what she said? ‘Don’t make me choose between you and a Chunky with raisins.’ I’m her daughter, but that only counts for so much.”

Another thing about Deedee: her voice. She has the deep, throaty timbre of a blues singer, like she gargled with Scotch as a girl, like her vocal cords were aged in oak casks. Not a pretty voice, but an interesting one, the way some faces can be interesting. I could listen to her for hours. And she must be accustomed to people listening, because she tends to talk in monologues.

“So you’re going to do some painting?”

“And some sunbathing,” she says. “Though it’s still a little brisk. I’m taking a break from the church mural. Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to the thing at all. It’s not what I was hoping. I’m not happy with it at all.”

“I was going to stop by and take a look.”

“Well, don’t. You’ll only vex me, Elizabeth, and I don’t need vexing at this point.”

I love that she uses words like vex, and that she insists on using my full name. I remember her chagrin when I first insisted that Jed and Eli were my sons’ names, and they weren’t shortened versions of Jedediah or Elihu.

“All right,” I say. “No vexing.”

For as long as I’ve known her, Deedee has been complaining about the mural in the nave of her parish church. The artwork, she says, could have come straight from some pious child’s illustrated Bible. “It’s a particular sort of commercial kitsch. An affront to beauty, and probably to God too.” Then a few months ago the priest called on the Smythes with a proposition. As part of the ongoing renovation of the historic building, why not commission the famous artist in their midst to paint a new mural? “‘Absolutely not,’ I told him. ‘No way, not ever.’ But, Elizabeth, the man is a Jesuit. They practically invented logic. Whatever objection I raised, he had an answer. ‘You can have a free hand,’ he said. ‘Paint whatever you’re inspired to paint.’ And there was Mother the whole time, just loving the idea. She’s never much cared for my work, but there she was just swelling with pride. What could I do? What could I do?”

Every couple of weeks I venture up to the church for a look at her progress. It’s uphill all the way, so I approach the miniature spires with their recessed grottoes for statued saints with a burn in my calves. Inside, there’s a musty smell that goes well with the gloom. I always look around furtively, afraid I might be interrupting some arcane ritual. But usually the place is empty. Like a small-scale Michelangelo, Deedee has erected a scaffold and screened off the wall with a swath of plastic sheeting. When she’s at work, the shop lights inside the enclosure make the plastic glow white, and you can see her silhouette pacing back and forth.

The last time I checked, however, Deedee wasn’t working. She’d painted over most of what she’d already done.

“I should never have agreed,” she says. “I’m not a religious artist. I don’t understand religious art.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t think of it as religious. Just do what you do.”

This stops her for a moment. She studies me closely. “You know who you sound like? The priest.”

At the edge of the garden, beside a low stone wall half sunk in the earth, she erects her easel, unfolds her chair, and unslings the shoulder bag full of paints and caked brushes and other paraphernalia.

“You wouldn’t be more comfortable in your studio?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “That’s where I work. This is where I think.”

Her studio is another one of the former outbuildings, perhaps twice the size of Rick’s shed and equally stuffed, with beautiful skylight windows in the roof. The only examples of Deedee’s work I have seen in person are the canvases stacked on one side of the studio under a drape cloth. She paints very detailed, almost photographic pictures, but with a surreal flatness to them, so that they appear both real and imaginary at the same time. I’m no art critic. To the extent that I have any taste at all, I’m drawn more to folk art. Deedee’s work is nothing like that. I love it, though, mainly because I love her.

“What are you doing out here, anyway?” she asks. “Not that I mind. It’s just, you’re usually running around like a decapitated chicken. I’m not used to you standing still for this long.”

“Hmm,” I say.

Rick doesn’t like me sharing family business with the neighbors. It’s not about keeping up appearances. What’s private is private, that’s all. Not to mention, he tells me, we don’t want to reinforce people’s stereotypical view of Christians. By the stone wall, we’re within earshot of his shed. He’s probably eavesdropping right now.

“The thing is,” I say, glancing toward the shed’s window, “my husband had a psychotic break this morning. He’s holed up in the shed right now, saying he won’t come out for a month, not until God talks to him or something . . .”

Her eyes widen. “Oh, it’s like that book. The one where the man goes to the shack and it turns out Oprah is really God.”

“Not exactly.”

“No, really,” she insists. “There was a thing about it in the Times.”

“Oh, I’m familiar with the book.” Boy, am I! Both of the ladies’ book clubs I belong to read it in turns. The first one wanted to shellac the book in gold dust and the second one wanted to burn it. “I’m just saying, I don’t think that’s where Rick got the idea. But who knows?” I raise my voice a little. “I wouldn’t put it past him to rip off somebody else’s idea.”

One, two . . . and there it is. The shed door swings open and Rick appears. He doesn’t glance our way. He pretends he doesn’t know we’re watching. Closing the door with exaggerated care, he beats a path back to the house, eyes down.

“Well,” Deedee says, “I don’t know if it was God he heard or you, sweetheart. But he doesn’t look too keen. Maybe you’re being a little hard on him.”

This coming from a woman who never married. A woman who, according to Roy Meakin, was nothing if not hard on the men who entered her life. Those who don’t know are always quickest with their advice.

“Maybe. Then again, he’s being pretty hard on me.”





The silent treatment. Rick’s at the kitchen table, not even acknowledging the fact that I’ve entered the room. He sits crouched over a spiral notepad, scratching out some kind of note. I put the empty coffee cup I’ve been carrying around on the drying rack. No, wait. I pick it up, fill it three quarters of the way full, and stir in some half-and-half before setting the cup at his elbow. He glances at the coffee, not at me. On the pad in front of him, he’s written down a supply list.

Utz crab chips (3)

Bottled water (3 cases)

Snickers minis (4 bags)

Juice boxes, apple (3)

Bread (2)

Peanut butter

Nutella

Tuna (10)

Mayo (1)

“What is this?” I ask. “Are you going to the grocery store?”

“I’m trying to make a list of everything I’m going to need.”

“Maybe you should fast instead. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

He puts the pen down heavily. “Listen, Beth. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m not even asking you to. This . . . It could be the most important decision I make.”

Resting my hand on his shoulder, I slide into the chair beside him, trying hard to bottle up what I’m feeling and appear sympathetic. He tenses, lowering deeper into his crouch, his head halfway to the tabletop like he’s bracing for whatever’s about to fall on him.

“Don’t you think this is an important decision for both of us?” I ask. “Instead of cutting yourself off from the rest of the world, from your family, from me, maybe we need to work through this together.”

“If I could explain what I’m thinking, I would, but clearly I can’t.”

“We need this time together, Rick. We need it. You and me. I can’t put it any plainer than that.”

“I heard what you said out there. My psychotic break.”

“You’re not listening,” I say. “We need time together, away from everything. We need to work on us before we make any other decisions.”

He scoots his chair away from me, pulling his shoulder free. “You can’t make this about the relationship, okay? This is more than that. Deeper. It’s not about us.”

“It’s about you.”

“No, Beth, it’s not about me. It’s about him. Don’t you get that? What I need from you is support and you’re just cutting away at me, all these little slices until I’m bleeding to death. What’s wrong with you? You know I’m committed to my ministry. You know what my life has to be. You’ve always known, right from the start. And I thought you believed in it.”

“So if I don’t go along with this craziness, it’s because I don’t believe? That’s my problem—really? You really think that because I don’t want you to spend your vacation living off crab chips and Snickers and bottled water that I must not have faith? Maybe I don’t, not in this. I mean, if you put some locusts and honey on your list, I could at least take you a little more seriously.”

He gets up again and walks out. He has this way of doing it too, like he’s wasted all the time he can spare on my issues and needs to get back to what really matters. Used to be, we’d have a spat like this and I’d break down, waiting tearfully for him to come back and apologize. Then I learned that Rick never comes back. Not because he’s still angry. He’s simply put the whole business out of his mind, filed it away with all the other minutia.

Fine. I rip the page off the top of his spiral pad, delighting for a moment in the jagged spine of paper left behind in the rings. I grab the car keys and my wallet. If my husband wants to live off crab chips and candy bars, fine. Either he’ll choke on his Nutella or he’ll come crawling back in from the shed, hungry for real food, and admit he was wrong the whole time. With any luck, he will break on Day One and we can leave for Florida as planned.

“Honey,” I call with caustic sweetness, “I’m running to the Giant. Don’t forget about your son’s bicycle tire. And he’s got a birthday next week too, in case it slipped your mind.”





The Rent-a-Mob is back at the corner. Trapped by the red light at the opposite intersection, I gaze at them with something akin to longing. Chas Worthing straddles a fat drum, beating a tempo while a half dozen others chant slogans at the top of their lungs. Even with my window cranked down, the noise of the traffic drowns out everything but the beat. Ramming speed!

How nice it must be, how wonderful, to set up in the middle of the bustling world and give yourself permission to scream. Even if your voice is overwhelmed, even if no one can make out a word you’re saying, to fill your lungs and let go, emptying yourself into the sound . . . It must be liberating. I can see why they’d do it, no matter what the cause. The rest of us, we keep our opinions to ourselves, and we certainly don’t yell about them. Or if we do, we only yell at the ones who love us and know us best, the ones least able to hear a word we say.

The light changes and the east-west traffic yields to us north-southers. As the VW chugs up to speed and I coast past them, I extend my hand out the window. I wave. Not good enough. I lean closer to the window, letting the wind buffet my face, and yell—“Whooooooo!”—as loud as I can. Chas Worthing doesn’t look up. The Rent-a-Mobbers can’t hear me any more than I can hear them.

But the driver behind me beeps his horn.

“Sorry!”

I say it out loud, then mouth the words into the rearview mirror, then give an exaggerated shrug. Sorry, you big SUV. Sorry for costing you a second of time. Sorry for swerving a little in my lane. Sorry for opening my big mouth and trying to speak.