Crossroads

“Tanner convinced you, I gather?”

“Well, it is my church.”

Laura shook the match and frowned. “You go to church?”

“You mean, on Sunday?”

“I wasn’t aware that you’re a churchgoer.”

“I guess you don’t know me.”

“Is that a yes?”

Becky didn’t see why it mattered. “I’m saying you don’t know me.”

“Yeah, and maybe I don’t know Crossroads, either. Kind of makes me glad I got out when I did.”

Again Becky flashed hot. “I’m sorry—do you have a problem with me?”

“Only in a general way. I hope it’s a good experience for you.”

Leaving Becky trembling, Laura plunged into the oily ponytails and embroidered denim surrounding Tanner and dispensed some of the hugs she hadn’t felt like giving Clem. Only in a general way? So far, at least, Becky had done nothing more threatening than join Crossroads. It was almost as if the Natural Woman had smelled the letter she was carrying.

Seeing no chance of catching Tanner alone, she went home with the letter. It now had a spot of salad oil on it, but she couldn’t bear to open it again. She also couldn’t bear to keep it for another week. She thought of mailing it, but she didn’t know if Tanner still lived with his parents; she had only the dimmest sense of his life outside the Grove. She was at the point of looking for his name in the phonebook when she recalled the word churchgoer.

In the morning, she asked her mother if she ever saw Tanner Evans at Sunday services. Her mother conveyed, with a look and a pause, that her curiosity about Tanner had been noted. “Not the nine o’clock,” she said. “I think I have seen him on Sunday, though. You can ask your father.”

It was none of her father’s business. On Sunday morning, when Clem and Perry were sleeping and her parents and Judson had left for the early service, she put on a demure full-skirted dress and walked down to First Reformed with the letter in her purse. Except for “midnight” Christmas services (which, like all things Midwestern, happened an hour early), she hadn’t gone to a service since she finished Sunday school. The faces of older parishioners brightened with pleasure and surprise when she crossed the sanctuary’s carpeted parlor. Her mother, in a church dress, and her father, in his vestments, were chatting with some nine o’clockers who’d lingered at the inter-service coffee hour. Judson sat in a corner reading a book, waiting to be taken home. When her mother saw Becky, it was clear from the slyness of her smile that she knew why she was there.

Taking a program from the greeters, she sat down in the last row of pews and waited to see if she’d guessed right about Laura’s peculiar question. Might Laura come here, too? From the way she’d said churchgoer, Becky doubted it. The organist started up, playing something that her aunt could have named the composer of, and the late crowd began to fill the pews. With each new arrival, she turned to see if it was Tanner, until she became self-conscious about turning too often. She smoothed her skirt, folded her program into a small triangle, and fixed her eyes on the huge wood-and-brass cross hanging behind the altar. The longer she stared at it, the odder it seemed. The fact of its being manufactured somewhere, with the same kind of tools that made useful cabinets and furniture. Cross maker: what a weird nine-to-five to have. And paid how? With the money that people unaccountably, in exchange for nothing, dropped into wood-and-brass collection plates, possibly made by the same worker.

The Tanner who entered the sanctuary, by himself, just after eleven, was hardly the Tanner she knew. He was wearing a dopey plaid sport coat and an actual necktie, albeit loose-knit and lumpily knotted. He slipped into the pew across the aisle from her, and she returned her eyes to the altar, where her father and Reverend Haefle were entering through a side door, but her skin knew precisely when Tanner turned and saw her; she felt it go hot. The music stopped, and Tanner, half standing, crossed the aisle and sat down by her.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

She shook her head to shush him.

“Heavenly Father,” her father prayerfully intoned from the pulpit; and that was all she heard before her ears went deaf. He was a tall and handsome man, but to Becky the black robe he was wearing and the devout sincerity of his delivery more than negated any standing he had as a man in the world. She sat frozen but squirmed inside, counting the seconds until he shut up. It came to her now, with a clarity brought by her return after long absence, how much she must have always hated being a minister’s daughter. The fathers of her friends designed buildings, cured illness, prosecuted criminals. Her father was like a cross maker, only worse. His earnest faith and sanctity were an odor that had forever threatened to adhere to her, like the smell of Chesterfields, only worse, because it couldn’t be washed off.

But then, when the congregation rose to sing the Gloria Patri and Tanner, at her side, in his ridiculous sport coat, sang forth in a clear, strong voice, unlike her own self-conscious murmur, and when she tried raising her own voice accordingly, As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be, she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something. She wondered if the desire might always have been there; if it had only been her father, the shame of him, that repelled her from pursuing it. If maybe the fact of the brass cross, its manufacture, wasn’t so dumb. Maybe it was more like amazing that two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion people were still filling collection plates to make crosses in his honor.