| |
On an October evening, the night having closed in by five in the afternoon, Elodie, Philippe, and Meredith sat at the dining room table, just lingering with each other, the anger spent but the anguish still palpable between them. Meredith was stronger, but still wan. Philippe took another small corner of Roquefort and spread the pungent cheese on a slice of crusty baguette. As he bit in, the cool, tangy cheese clung to his palette. Oh Lord, he thought, even in the midst of death we are in the midst of life. Or was it the other way around?
“You know, I wasn’t called to the ministry,” Meredith said.
While Philippe cleared his mouth, Elodie spoke for him.
“We never expected that of you.”
“But just by being a preacher’s kid, people expected me to be more angelic. To be morally perfect, actually, just like people expected you to be. I couldn’t do it.”
Philippe sat, made of marble. Let her speak, he thought. Let’s have it, the blame, shifting responsibility for what she did to me. All the things humans do. Let your daughter be a human.
“Do you remember Madame Lamblin?” Meredith asked.
Philippe did. Always wore a hat with a jaunty feather. So French. She was just about the sweetest saint he’d ever met.
“She saw me flirting outside a movie known for its graphic sex. She told me to be careful. It was so annoying! No, it was worse than annoying. To be watched, to be noticed. All that noticing! People expected me to behave better, to believe better, to profess better, to set an example. They overlooked the fact that I was just another kid.”
Philippe met her gaze and nodded. He was sorry. He knew being a Christian sometimes felt like living in a fishbowl, with everybody watching, looking for an excuse not to follow Jesus just because a Christian dropped some baguette crumbs down his chest or said “shit!” when he couldn’t find his keys. Just because he wasn’t perfect, and, by extension, neither was the church. Yet Philippe felt that Christians did have a God-given responsibility to strive toward perfection in their attitudes and actions. We all fail so miserably, Philippe thought. It’s only by God’s grace that we survive moment to moment.
“I have to take responsibility for what I did—” and Meredith’s shoulders crumpled as she turned away from her parents, toward the wall. “It was the alcohol—”
Philippe and Elodie waited. He could hear that outside, at the end of Chemin de Fer, across Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, the Metro train was diving into its tunnel on its way underground to the heart of Paris.
Meredith turned back to them, her eyes big with tears.
“But I had to rebel, I had to rebel against defining myself by other people’s expectations. I had no sense of freedom. I was sick of the faux-moral façade I had to wear, just to survive. I didn’t know what I believed. And you couldn’t tell what I was going through.”
No, he hadn’t known. Her unhappiness had escaped his notice. He was sorry he had failed her. But here she was, just like everybody else, expecting him to be perfect. He was trying, for love of Jesus—he meant that not as a swear word.
He stayed silent. What could he do differently in the future? Refuse to accept people’s answers of “I’m fine”? Ask more probing questions? Dig deeper? Listen better? Be attentive longer as people complained, rather than interrupt with encouragement? What exactly had he done wrong? Teenagers don’t accept their parents trying to know them better. Why couldn’t Meredith have gone to Madame Lamblin or one of the other mature women for advice? Madame Lamblin had been right to caution Meredith outside that movie theater.
Oh Lord, what a muddle we’re in. Help us all!
