Lit in Progress

Dear church family,

Thank you all so much for your prayers for my son. He is still having some difficulties with his coach, and I would appreciate further prayer for him to have wisdom. I also have an unspoken request that I would appreciate your holding up in prayer.

In Christ, Marienne

I can’t stand you! I can’t stand this! Who do you think you are? How can you be such a jerk?

She sat still, listening. The house creaked; someone upstairs moved. Breathing. Sighing. She heard him turn, grasp for her, settle back. She waited. Come, come, don’t make me do this. I don’t want to. Or maybe I do. Give me just a bit! An inch! All I want now is for us to be quiet together. Not to talk or yell or rage or glare, just to be quiet together.

But you won’t. I can’t. Maybe tomorrow.

The phone rang. And again. He grunted and pushed his ear into the pillow. It rang again.

She knew he never woke up until the fourth ring, just when the machine took it up.

He cursed and pulled the sheet aside. Beth rolled onto his side of the bed and pulled his pillow under her head, tangling her dark hair in her arm. She breathed deeply and was still.

“Hello, you have reached the Noll residence, please – ”

“What?” He pushed random buttons on the machine to make it shut up, couldn’t hear anything through the beeps.

“Wha’dju say?” he asked again, rubbing his forehead.

“It’s Marienne.” She heard him breathing, heard the grandfather clock chiming in the background. There was stillness for a moment.

“Where are you?”

“In Nashville. With Flo. I wanted to tell you. So you’d know.” Marienne stared into her cousin’s sink with its dirty Tupperware and bottle of soap, rolling the phone cord back and forth between her fingers. There wasn’t any sound. He had hung up.

Marienne sat in the bus station, watching her teal hardside luggage with half her mind and the clock with the other half. She listened as mothers tried to keep their children from catapulting into things, as chatty types discussed the weather, the end times. She listened as men and women tried to speak in each other’s languages. She listened, and watched the clock, and her luggage.

She sat still, waiting. The bus drove in, and still she sat. She could feel her hair move slightly in the heated room. She could feel her bag in her hand, her pen and paper and clothes and life just inside her softside suitcase. She breathed slowly, shallowly. The bus doors opened.

People like she’d seen before, like she hadn’t, filed in. Loudly, silently, smelling of detergent and perfume and salty unwashed skin. A misunderstanding with a ticket a young man in a ponytail didn’t have; she rose.

A woman with a narrow smile and a faded flowered dress let her in line, asked if she spoke español. Asked where she was going. I … yo … no sé. The woman patted her arm and smiled again.

The man took her ticket. She filed in. The rolling suitcase clack-clacked on the floor. She picked it up and carried it down to an empty seat. She leaned her head against the window, against the greasy mark where someone else had leaned their head on the ride here. The bus around her was alive, moving, breathing balmy air through its grill, staring with stolidly bright eyes up the street, past merging, honking, careful buicks and dodges, past unmanicured meridians and dirty curbs. Its sides shook with the effort of carrying so many things in its belly. The road unfolded before it like the peel of an apple, and the road disappeared somewhere behind the loud windy back wall.

Marienne drew a breath of cold air through her nose. It stung. She slowly let the air out her mouth, watching steam curl around her face as she waited beside the bus’s belly. Eventually the man got to her two bags. She looked at him as he lifted them, tthohat, and dropped them in the line of unclaimed baggage, sclok. A corner of her green bag was resting on an older woman’s teal hardside. The woman looked stonily, like Maryanne, at her belongings. She pushed the green bag down, off, with her hand and handed the hardside to someone else to carry.

Marienne waited. She picked up what was hers, and noticed that the wheels left skid marks on the pavement when she turned around. She started toward the door, through which she could see a wall of payphones. One was ringing, two others were being used by a tweedy older man with thin grey hair and a pair of young women who weren’t wearing bras, with their arms around each other’s waists.

Marienne. Go call a cab.

Marienne ambled past the glass windows, the ATMs, the brightly-colored fast food restaurants that stood like sentries along the road. She slowed as she neared a tangle of young people sitting and standing outside a music store. A thin young woman with straight hair sat on a boy’s lap, talking with animated gestures, but a curiously monotone voice. Her hair swished around her arms as she hugged the boy she’d been sitting on. They got up, and she went over to another girl and they walked to the window of the store, pointing out some now album or other.

Marienne started – a man bumped into her arm on his way out of a shop. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, looking dog-like. His long grey hair hung around his face like dirty icicles from a truck grill. She looked small, he thought. Not physically small – she was as tall as he – but drawn into herself, and only recently startled into looking outward.

He seemed kind of silly, she thought. His jacket was wrinkled, his jeans torn. And yet he walked so uprightly and appeared so relaxed, like he’d just come out of a board meeting of his Fortune 500 company and been told very good news. Incongruous was the word she though of when she looked at him.

They hadn’t moved. They were still standing there, looking at one another apologetically, when Flo came out of the cafe and said, “There you are! Who’s this?”