Crossroads

In her tennis shoes and her oft-mended gabardine overcoat, she proceeded past trees whose bark was darkened by the moisture their frozenness had condensed, past residential façades no longer promising the marital stability they had in the forties, when they were built. Her gait felt more waddling than striding, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being noticed. Unless it was to pity her for not owning a car, no one gave a thought to a pastor’s wife out walking by herself. As soon as people had met her and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them. Sexually, there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her. She’d become invisible especially to her husband in this respect. Invisible to her kids as well—rendered featureless by the dense, warm cloud of momminess through which they apprehended her. Although she considered it possible that not one person in New Prospect actively disliked her, there was no one she could call a close friend. However short on money she was, perennially, she was even poorer in the currency of friendship, the little secrets that friends shared to build trust. She had plenty of secrets, but they were all too large for a pastor’s wife to safely betray.

What she had instead of friends, on the sly, was a psychiatrist, and she was late for her appointment with her. She detested jogging, the thudding downward flesh-tug of her heavy parts, but when she turned onto Maple Avenue she started running with short and shallow steps, which conceivably burned more calories, per unit of distance, than walking did. The houses along Maple were a free-for-all of competitive decoration, their shrubbery and railings and rooflines infested with green plastic vines bearing fruits in dull colors. It wasn’t clear to Marion that the charm of Christmas lights at night was enough to offset how ugly the hardware looked in daylight hours, of which there were many. Nor was it clear that the excitement of Christmas for children was enough to make up for the disenchanted drudgery of it in their adult years, of which there were likewise many.

At Pirsig Avenue, she slowed to a marching pace. The only person in New Prospect who knew she was seeing a psychiatrist was the receptionist at the thriving dentistry practice of Costa Serafimides, in a low brick building near the train station. Dr. Serafimides’s wife, Sophie, saw her psychiatric patients in a small, unmarked room between identical rooms in which plaque was scraped and cavities filled. Anyone who noticed Marion in the waiting room would assume that she was there for such work. Once she was in Sophie’s office, she could hear the squeak of rubber-soled comfort shoes, the whine of motive cords on pulleys, and smell the pleasant antiseptic peculiar to dentistry. The office contained two leather chairs, shelves of reference works, framed certificates (Sofia Serafimides, MD), and a deep-drawered credenza full of drugs. It was like a modernized confessional box, a not greatly secluded place to have the inside of one’s head scraped, with payment exacted not in future Hail Marys but in cash on the spot.

Marion in her early twenties had been a seriously practicing Catholic. She’d believed, at the time, that the Church had saved her life, or at least her sanity, but later on, after she’d met Russ and made herself a level-headed Protestant, she’d come to see her youthful Catholicism as another form of craziness, more sustainable than the form that had landed her in a hospital at the age of twenty, but morbid nonetheless. It was as if, in her Catholic phase, she’d lived under a vault that made the sunniest day dark. She’d been obsessed with sin and redemption, prone to being overwhelmed by the significance of insignificant things—a leaf that fell and landed at her feet, a song she heard playing in two different places on the same day—and paranoid with the sense that God was watching everything she did. When she’d fallen in love with Russ, and had received the wonderfully concrete blessings of her marriage to him, one healthy child after another, each one of them precious enough to have sufficed, she’d closed a mental door on the years when the sun had been dark and her only friend, if one could call an infinite Being a friend, had been God. The incessantly praying girl she’d been at twenty-two signified mainly as the person she was blessed not to be anymore.