THE WOMAN AT THE WELL

I spent my first summer home from college jobless; the application I filed at the public library never panned out, and even the bookstores in town—the two at the local shopping mall specializing in mass-market paperbacks—lacked the need for my part-time help. So I read. I watched television. I wrote letters. I ran around town with my mother, the running around we’d always done: shopping for groceries, “junking” through thrift shops, trying on clothes at department stores. The fact that we did the same old things together made it seem like she was her same old self: healthy, taking care of everyone else, never requiring more than a tiny favor, a quick hand at something or other. And, with the exception of a new sense of relief—more than relief, of joy—at having survived the surgery and lived the many months with no new dark spots spreading like moss on her insides, she may as well have been identical to how she was before any of us learned she was sick. No, after the worry that gripped our home when I’d left that fall—worry I’d only partly been able to internalize, being so selfishly and single-mindedly fixated upon reaching the promised land of college—I returned home that summer with the distinct impression that it was I who had undergone the most drastic of changes.

Preposterous as it now seems, the impression had something subtle and unexamined to do with my mother’s wish that I move within a cloud of hope or, more accurately, of ignorance to the stakes she was gambling on. Certainly, I knew then that cancer kills, but she told me over and over again that her cancer was gone, that God had healed her. And because those were the things I wanted to believe, I believed them.

Soaring over the country in the cabin of a 747 only to touch down in the strip-mall suburbs, I felt like Icarus on the descent. I’d felt it after flying home at Christmas, too, when I’d first seen my hometown through changed eyes. There had been so much I wanted to apologize for, so much I wanted to tidy up or correct, if only to protect my own sense of where I had come from. The plain, cookie-cutter houses. The acres and acres of parking lot. And oh, the people. How many of them now seemed dim and fat, trudging along behind shopping carts piled with products that seemed to confirm an utter lack of imagination and taste?

In the back of my mind that summer was a constant awareness that in three months’ time I would be describing these very days and nights to my new friends back at school—characterizing them as quaint or pathetic, editing the details just enough so as to carve out a strategic distance between me and what was beginning to feel like my old life. Without my deciding it, an air of supercilious contempt crept into much of what I saw about the place I came from. Mostly, I was lamenting the absence of freedom. The freedom to come and go as I pleased, with whom I chose and for reasons I did not need to explain. I missed the thrill of having places to be and the ease of passage that felt a universe away from life in Fairfield, where nothing and no one was knocking down my door and where I’d have been hard-pressed—carless and unemployed as I was—to get anywhere even if they had been.

One afternoon, my mother walked into the family room, where I sat propped against the base of the couch watching reruns.

“I’d like you to do something for me.” From her tone of voice, I could tell it was something I would not look forward to doing.

“Okay,” I muttered, “what is it?” The question didn’t have anything to do with my having the option of saying no. I simply needed to know to what extent I ought to embrace the approaching sense of dread. Was she going to suggest I spend the afternoon with one of her elderly friends or that I run a dust cloth over the furniture in the living room? Or could she have been preparing to ask me to walk the five blocks to Kmart and parade home with a mortifying and unwieldy thirty-six-pack of quilted toilet paper?

It is safe to say I was even more of an adolescent than I’d been when I left home. After nine months away, I had become silent, shirking, always inching toward whatever corner seemed to afford even a momentary scrap of privacy. And judgmental. How small my parents had become, suddenly, in my estimation. My once-elegant father, whom I’d always likened to Cary Grant because of what sounded to me like a mid-Atlantic accent (in truth it was probably just the remains of a southern twang after thirty or more years of disuse), had become coarsely ordinary, fraternizing with our simple neighbors, sympathizing with the wrong politicians, eating with such gusto that I regretted having learned to love the very same foods. To top things off, he had discovered a penchant for country singers like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, music that would have been decidedly laughable back then in the dorms. Nowadays, Willie Nelson’s voice puts me in immediate mind of my father and causes my eyes to well up with tears, but that summer, finding LPs of Garth Brooks and Clint Black propped near the stereo, I grew anemic with humiliation.

I’d been pulling away from my mother subtly ever since the season of the affair with my teacher, which had taught me to hide the feelings and wishes that love set into play. I knew how to put my errant thoughts and wishes on mute when Mom and I were together and how to be vague about certain specifics of my coed life. But the best proof that I was still an adolescent is the fact that I came home feeling like an adult. It was that knowledge—the knowledge that I’d snuck and grown up—that brought with it a self-consciousness I had never before noticed during my times alone with my mother. Stranded, idle, and suddenly cut off from everyone and everything that shaped my new sense of self and purpose, the need to put some distance between my mother and myself suddenly felt urgent, desperate. I had jumped ship on the life she’d been guiding me toward for nineteen years, and I could tell she knew. She looked at me from a different kind of distance, as though I’d gone feral and she was afraid I’d threaten her with my teeth if she got too close. Of course, most of the time, we still laughed and talked like we used to. And I was still capable of eliciting her great broad smile or coaxing her to laughter, usually when there was a group of us around the table after dinner, but the silences between us when we were alone together seemed different. I sensed that she was aware of everything I wasn’t saying, and the fact of it produced a very articulate variety of wordlessness on both our parts.

Sometimes now, I wonder if she might have been waiting for me to approach her and ask what she felt and thought, what it felt like to be her at that unthinkably harrowing juncture in her life. Sometimes, too, I wonder if she ever hoped I might sit down on the side of her bed and tell her what my life felt like and what it was composed of. Not just what I knew she wanted to hear but the truth, my truth.

But no matter how much of an adult I fancied myself to be, I couldn’t do that, couldn’t open the door onto my world and invite her in.

Did I really think she’d have been surprised? I’d felt that way about Conrad, too, and had tried to hide from him the fact that I was sleeping with my boyfriend. One Sunday morning, he drove to Cambridge for coffee and called me from one of the campus phones in the Yard. I’d had to hurry to get my boyfriend out of the room and make it look like I was just waking up, but I’d done a sloppy job and had had to come clean. I was expecting Conrad to look at me with disappointment, to reprimand me in some way, but all he said was “Relax, Trace. I was in college once, too, you know.” That may not be how my mother would have responded to the situation, not with her youngest daughter, the baby of the family. But if I had been more courageous, like Michael had been after he met Kathleen, we could have moved past the shock and into a relationship where plain, unabashed truths might be asked for and offered.

At the time, though, it didn’t seem fair to me that what in many other families would have been considered natural or even healthy development for a girl my age should open up such feelings of guilt and shame in mine or that my mother should view my inevitable ascent into adulthood first and foremost as a threat. Even so, I told myself it was nothing compared to what some families went through, nothing in comparison to what Mom’s friend Nella from the adult school had had to confront when, right around the time I was entering junior high, her daughter, Lisa, began showing the unmistakable signs of addiction.

The whispers back then were about crack cocaine, whispers that seemed to be corroborated by Lisa’s newly strange behavior. She’d disappear for days or weeks at a time and then turn up looking ravaged, desperate, and wordless, or else brimming with an infuriating laughter when asked to explain. I’d spared my mother the turmoil that had aged Nella and drained her spirit of its vigor. The big, mirthful woman who had been such a fixture of my childhood withdrew. Her face was drawn and serious, and the songlike laugh was gone. I rarely saw her after things became serious with Lisa. I heard that Anthony became a football star at his high school, but once Nella stopped coming around, Anthony, too, dwindled to just a memory, an echo of a hushed rumor.

I hadn’t done a thing like that to my mother, but it was no great feat; no one had expected me to. What they had expected, I reckoned, was that I would walk the line my mother had sketched for me with her own exemplary words and deeds.

Standing before me on that summer afternoon, about to reveal the details of the favor I’d have no choice but to agree to, my mother was impeccable in her pastel skirt and blouse, with her hair sculpted into a neat chignon. She looked pretty and kind and solid, like a matriarch, which is what, over the years, she had become. In the old photos, she is girlish and sexy, a young woman testing her power in front of the camera. But standing there above me that day, the only word that came to mind was proper, characterized by virtue and propriety. There was nothing in her life that she could not have stood before a great crowd and testified to, and though that had become her strength—what everyone praised her for, what even we had begun to attribute her apparent recovery to—there was a part of me that had come, just a little and all at once, to resent it.

“First Baptist is hosting Vacation Bible School next week, and I’d like you to volunteer to help with one of the classes.”

I’d grown up at First Baptist. I’d hardly missed a Sunday in all the years of living in Fairfield with my family. Through grade school, I had learned the Bible lessons taught with paper cutouts on a felt board. I’d saved my coins for the collection plate and happily risen to sing the hymns. I’d run around on the steps outside the main sanctuary with the other children while my parents greeted their friends and caught up on the week’s events before heading home for supper. I’d even begged, at age six or seven, to be baptized and stood stiff as a plank while I was tipped back into the symbolic water (for the occasion, my mother had sewn me two new dresses: one to wear under the white baptismal robe and another to change into after the first one got wet), but suddenly the thought of spending more than the requisite two hours once per week at the church felt like a sentence. Perhaps because I was already in the habit of seeing my experiences at home through the eyes of my friends back at school, I quaked at the prospect of having to make sense of Vacation Bible School. Oh, no, I thought. Not that place. Not that battalion of billowy, perfumed ladies with their faces creased into joyless smiles. Not their sons and daughters, serious and old beyond their years, faces fixed in—spare me!—godly resignation.

Not terribly long before, on a Sunday when we’d invited a young deacon and his family home with us after church, I’d been the target of a very matter-of-fact dismissal when the man—an otherwise pleasant-enough father in his forties—noticed my copy of Of Human Bondage on a side table. From the look he’d shot me, he must have decided then and there that Maugham’s novel was little more than a handbook on S and M. If only I had had the wherewithal to set him straight. Instead, I sat stock-still in my seat, feeling as if I’d done something wrong. Maybe I’d felt chastened because the book, no matter what it was about, signaled to him that my appetites were for the world and not for God, an insinuation I’d have been hard-pressed to refute. I remember the sneer he’d shot me later, when flipping through some albums propped by the stereo, he’d seen something else not to his liking. At the time, I was still in high school, still technically blameless as far as his moral compass was concerned, and so I couldn’t help sensing that what he was seeing in me was a projection of some dark facet of his own inner life.

Though there were surely exceptions, it seemed that the church people with whom we tended to socialize were often just different enough from us to make me self-conscious or squirmy and uncomfortable. It was more rare than not to happen upon a family who seemed to resemble us: grounded, functional, cheerful, and made up of real people, but my parents persisted in trying, perhaps out of a sincere wish to add to their circle of friends or perhaps merely out of the obligation to be welcoming to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe it was also designed to show my siblings and me—with the emphasis, now that my siblings were all grown up, on me—that it was possible to reserve a space for God in an otherwise “normal” life.

But I did not want to go to Vacation Bible School. Not even for one week if it meant I’d have to spend part of every day with the other volunteers who all said they wanted to be missionaries when they grew up. And what if that deacon hadn’t been off base in pegging me as a bad Christian? On how many occasions in the previous nine months had I underplayed my upbringing in the church? Hadn’t I avoided taking a popular Harvard course on the Bible after hearing how, on the very first day of class, the professor had the habit of asking every student to raise a hand if he or she believed that the text was the true word of God? And I still didn’t know where the line stood in my mind between a life of the mind and one of the spirit—not to mention the body, which was also becoming a topic of increasing consequence to me.

“All right, if it’s important to you,” I told my mother, and though my voice said a lot about my true feelings on the matter, both of us knew I had no choice.

Several days later, I reported to a Sunday school classroom in the annex behind the main sanctuary building. After a few minutes, a group of third and fourth graders found seats and waited, fidgeting, for the class leader to address them. His name was Theo, a young man, about twenty-one or twenty-two, who studied accounting at a local college (as a precursor to theology, which he planned to take up in graduate school). Theo led the lessons each day, but he didn’t actually design them; that had been done by the group of ladies (his mother was one) who decided that the emphasis in the classroom this season should be “Ministry.” To that end, they’d picked a set of parables from the New Testament about Christ and the disciples. Theo spent part of each class narrating the stories that many of the children had already heard, about the loaves and the fishes, about Jesus healing the blind man and the lame man and raising Lazarus from the dead, and about the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair. I was mostly there for reinforcement. I didn’t say much, but I helped with activities, walking around the room and whispering encouragement as students drew or glued together projects meant to illustrate the lesson. Every day, we concluded with a reminder of how, just as Christ and the disciples preached the Gospel, these children should spread the Good News to their friends and family.

It wasn’t as painful as I’d expected. No matter how I thought I felt, the church was a familiar place to me, where much of my childhood had taken place. I remembered sitting in that classroom, or a room just like it, and eagerly demonstrating my knowledge of God’s word. And I remembered later giggling with some of the other girls while scouring Song of Solomon for instances of words like breast and loins. Mostly, I was comfortable there because the stories were all so familiar to me. I didn’t mind letting myself wander through them, filling in the details about who those people must really have been, trying to envision the disciples as human beings with smells and appetites and voices and teeth—as people like me who felt that God was real but who were also susceptible to a great many other things the world told them were real, too. While Theo was guiding the students through the text, pushing a little too hard to make them see what he had been told to make them see, I tried to imagine what all the Bible’s men and women—whether they were real figures or simply metaphors in this book that was also, on top of everything else, a work of great literature—might have felt in the presence of the ambassador for the all-powerful God, the mind of the universe.

One afternoon, we came to the story about the woman at the well. In it, a Samaritan woman encounters Christ sitting by a well. “Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again,” He tells her. “But whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst.” They speak for a few minutes about salvation, and He convinces her that He is the Messiah by telling her about her own past: that she has been married five times and that the man with whom she is currently living is not her husband.

Theo glossed over the implications of the five husbands by describing the woman as “unclean,” a term he didn’t quite manage to define for the children. Instead, he looked my way and allowed a flicker of accusation to travel from him to me, waking me from my daydream about the ordinary human passion the woman must have begun to feel for that young man who preached so far and wide about love and compassion. And then it struck me. Just like the deacon who had been horror-struck by my summer reading, Theo must have thought of me as a fallen woman.

Was it something I happened, at that very moment, to be unwittingly projecting—that I had, indeed, defied the Bible’s admonitions to remain chaste until marriage? It couldn’t have been my clothes; there was nothing suggestive or revealing about my T-shirts or my jeans or the demure dresses I always wore on Sundays. Was I releasing some pheromone that only devout Christians could detect? There must have been an explanation for why Theo—and, come to think of it, some of the other churchgoers that summer—seemed suddenly to regard me with discernible disappointment or barely disguised contempt.

And then, slowly, like a photo taking form in a basin of developer, I began to understand the rumor that was circulating among the congregants of First Baptist. I had been within earshot when it was first set loose at a ladies’ prayer luncheon in our own dining room just days after I’d arrived back home: And Dear Lord, a white-haired woman in fuchsia had said, with her arms raised Southern Baptist style so that they seemed to hover in the air like rabbit ear antennae, we pray for Kathryn’s daughter Tracy and her relationship (she’d paused just before that word, as if not sure she ought to use it) with her boyfriend. The six or seven ladies sitting alongside, my mother among them, had responded with some hushed variant of Yes, Lord and We lift her up to You. I was tiptoeing past the dining room table with a saucer of coffee cake to bring upstairs to my room when the prayer went around, when I heard my name and the unspoken assumption—that I was in danger of surrendering my virginity or, worse, that it had already gone the way of my milk teeth. Everyone’s eyes were closed, but fearing that a reaction of any kind on my part would merely serve to confirm what they had all been instructed to suspect, I strode past with all the poise I could summon, not breaking stride and with my chin up. I told myself that once I crossed from the parquet dining room floor to the carpet of the family room, I would be safe. Step by step across the hardwood floor, I willed my face to remain serenely blank. Every other day, it was the span of a few quick steps, but just then, the family room seemed infinitely far away. Step by step, I forced my features into a blank, placid expression and denied my eyes the opportunity to steal even a quick glance at the ladies at the table, lest any of them were watching. I walked past as though nothing were out of the ordinary, like a man who maintains unblinking eye contact when lying to your face.

Sitting that day in the air-conditioned Sunday school building with its three windows overlooking a concrete walkway and lawn dappled with trees, I felt an ire rise in my throat. Suddenly, I was livid at Theo and his mother and the chain of churchgoers who had passed that kernel of gossip back and forth under the guise of prayerful concern. For the first time, I allowed myself to savor a single dram of anger toward my mother—not for her wish that I remain the girl she had instructed me to be but for her need to discuss with others the girl she feared I was vying to become. I felt something else, too. Pushed as I was to consider the conflict that had been set into motion by my decision to go against what I’d been taught, my anger mingled with my nascent sexual knowledge, forming a very exhilarating third thing that seemed to fit quite nicely under the name Independence.

It was almost lunchtime. Some of the kids had grown restless from hunger. Some of them only came to Vacation Bible School in the first place for the meals or because their parents wanted them kept busy and out of the house for a few hours each day; it struck me as funny, thinking that my mom might have wanted the very same thing for me.

“He stands at the door of your heart and knocks,” Theo was saying in yet another attempt to persuade the kids to give their barely formed lives over to the Lord.

I walked over to an empty seat at one of the long classroom tables and, sitting down, took out a piece of paper and a pen.

God is not that small.

I wrote it over and over again, until Theo commanded us to bow our heads in prayer.