Kitabı oku: «Happily Even After», sayfa 3

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryan said in a voice too loud for a church hallway but much quieter than his usual tone in such situations. He pointed down the hall at the door I’d passed so many times, but never gone inside. “Come on. You’re going to have to go in there.”

More tugging and pushing. Him trying to take the baby, me taking her back. Him trying to take the diaper bag, me taking it back. Him throwing his head back as if he wanted to scream, me doing the same. Like a bad zit on prom night, things were coming to a head and this wasn’t the place for the mess.

Though we’d both dug in our heels, mine were a little too cute to endure for the long haul. Just as my wedges started to wobble, Ryan took my hand and kissed it before steadying me. “Baby, please. Can you just come on? I need to get back in the service. Pastor asked me to do something special today and I’m going to miss it. I know Mom is out of line. I do. It’s just not the time to deal with it.” He led me down the hall, toward the door I didn’t want to enter.

I followed, thankful that in the midst of the whole mess, Lily had somehow managed to fall asleep. Must be nice. “You always say that, Ryan. ‘I know Mom shouldn’t have said that. I know that hurt you. I’ll talk to her. It’s just not the right time.’ You know what I’m starting to think? It’ll never be the right time. I think you know that your mother will never accept me and you don’t really care. Well, I do—”

“Get over it.” Ryan folded his arms, rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. “You’ve got to go in there, so just do it and be done with it.”

I looked deeply into my husband’s eyes, wondering if he really saw me standing here, if he heard me breathing. It was me, wasn’t it? Tracey Blackman, business owner, graphic designer, new mother, his wife? I’d never had to wonder who I was before, but since marrying him, bearing his child, I found myself searching for identity more than ever. And my husband had just told me to get over it.

Mother Redding, the wife of the former pastor, who also happened to be the mother of the current one, stopped to smile at me on her way into the sanctuary. Liz (the only person people seemed to call Mrs. Blackman these days) said the former first lady was mean, but she’d never been anything but nice to me. I looked for her every week just to see what she was wearing. This morning she wore a bright orange suit with flames going down the back of her skirt. Fire climbed her shoes, too. As she reached the door, she gave me a wink, then straightened her shoulders and went inside the sanctuary. Her son’s booming voice burst through the door as she opened it.

My eyes looked back and forth from the door I’d come out of to the door it seemed I had no choice but to go into. Now I was going somewhere else, somewhere new, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I stared at the mahogany door once more and took a deep breath while reading the words engraved on the brass plate.

The Cry Room.

I remembered again why I’d never wanted to go inside previously. Who would want to spend a church service in a place with that name? Though I’d never been inside, I’d deduced that this was a place for mothers to take their crying babies. Did I mention that Lily wasn’t crying? I was the one about to burst into tears. At the beginning of my pregnancy, I’d enjoyed the way people had offered me a seat or given me special privileges, but even that had gotten old. Being escorted out of church and into a special room by my husband and mother-in-law was just too much.

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this kind of reaction to feeding my hungry baby, of course. I’d nursed Lily in hot cars, bathroom stalls and guest bedrooms. Church had been the only place in my life where all of the pieces of me—Christian, wife and mother—could exist at once. And now, even at church there was a special place for me to go, away from my husband, who seemed to be slipping from me by the second, from the pleading look in his tired eyes.

Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing, this forbidding door in front of me. Maybe it was time for me to find my own place, both in our marriage and in our church. I attempted to square my shoulders like that flaming-hot church mother had done, but I was too weighed down by the diaper bag on my shoulder and the baby in my arms. Instead of standing straight, I almost fell over. Again.

My husband sighed, but reached out to support me again. “What are you doing, Tracey? You’re going to drop the baby on the floor. Look, I’ve got to get back in there before Mom comes back out here and makes a scene, okay? It’s not a big deal to go in the Cry Room. Almost every church in Illinois has one of these now. There’s a window in there where you can see everything. And who knows, maybe you’ll make some friends here. It might be good for you.”

I took a deep breath. “Maybe I should just take Lily to the nursery and stay in the service with you. Maybe she’ll make some friends in there.”

Ryan lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t try to be funny, okay? You know Lily hates it in there. After the diaper rash and the screaming last time, we agreed that she’d stay with you. Since Mom is acting so crazy about you feeding her in the church, I guess that means we’ll be apart until you stop nursing, but don’t turn this into a big fight. Not now.”

Until I stop nursing? What was that supposed to mean?

He pulled back from me as if he’d touched something not so nice and straightened his tie, a silk one Rochelle had hand-painted and sent as a gift for his birthday. Right now, I wanted to wring Ryan’s neck with it and get in my car and drive the two hours back home to Leverhill, where Rochelle, Dana and my other friends from the Sassy Sistahood e-mail group still lived. My heart went back there for me, back to my old church where they let mothers feed their babies under a blanket and people knew how to say hello. Where—

“Tracey!”

As my husband raised his voice to the tone he used with his insubordinate employees, a baby on the other side of the door let out a piercing scream. My husband folded his arms and made an I-told-you-so face.

“See? There’s a reason for this. If that child was in the service, no one could hear and then the mother would have to get up and try to get out from between all those people—”

The door to the Cry Room jerked open and a woman I’d seen many times before stormed out with her crying child. Tears were streaming down her face, too. “Excuse me,” she said as she pushed past us.

I watched in amazement, first at the dark room revealed when she opened the door, and second at her exit from the one place that was supposed to be for crying. She wobbled on her high heels across the foyer to the nursery. I gasped in disbelief.

The door opened again and a smiling face appeared, a deacon’s wife whose name I couldn’t remember. Sister Hawkins, maybe? That sounded right. She ran the Mother-to-Mother ministry and had very definite ideas about what being a mother meant. Running my graphic-design firm, In His Image, from home and putting Lily in part-time day care did not fit with her concept of motherhood. Probably the only reason Mrs. Hawkins (that was her name!) still spoke to me was because I nursed Lily instead of giving her formula. She’d never say that, but it was the only thing she’d discussed in our brief conversations.

Ryan formed a tight smile as the woman stepped forward with one hand behind her to buffer the sound as the door closed. He narrowed his eyes at me a little, just enough that only I would notice. “Sorry about the noise. It’s our first time. It’s a little bit of an adjustment.”

Sister Hawkins leaned forward, speaking only to my husband and barely above a whisper. “We really like to keep it quiet here so that everyone can hear and the other babies stay peaceful. That baby—” she pointed down the hall toward the path that the mother who’d left had taken “—he wouldn’t take his bottle. Not much we could do to help with that….” She paused to quiver at the idea.

“Anyway, Brother Ryan, your wife and daughter are more than welcome to join us. We’ve been wondering why she hasn’t come in before now. I know that I sent her an invitation.” She smiled wide, revealing the gold front tooth that had surprised me the first time I saw it. Now it just made me want to giggle. There were a lot of things we could do to hide our pasts, but some things just told the tale for us. The light hit the gold tooth from all angles. My husband blinked as if someone had just taken his picture. I was too mad to laugh.

I forced my mouth shut when Ryan squeezed my hand. I hadn’t realized it’d been hanging open. I don’t know which thing stunned me more: Sister Hawkins’s gold tooth or the fact that babies couldn’t cry in the cry room. What was the point of the place then? I decided to ask. “So it’s not really a cry room, is it? It’s a place for moms to nurse their babies?”

The woman turned to me. “Yes, that’s it exactly. They’re called Nursing Mothers’ Rooms at some churches, but the Cry Room was what the building committee chose. I know it seems different at first, but it’s church policy. With Brother Ryan advancing in favor with the pastor and the other men, you don’t want to be disobedient and hold him back, right?” She patted my arm, then held it tight.

Feeling like a homesick kid on the first day of school, I gently pulled away. “I do want to follow the policy, but the church I grew up in doesn’t make the mothers leave the sanctuary to feed their babies. Our pastor wanted all the families to stay together—”

Ryan frowned. “He’s not your pastor anymore. And that’s not your church. This is. Now go on in, hon. I’ve got to get back.” He brought down his tone for Sister Hawkins’s sake and gave her a polite nod as well, but not before whispering, “I’m sorry,” out of the corner of his mouth.

I dropped my head. I was sorry, too. Once again, I was proving his mother right. That look on my husband’s face had said it all. Though he loved me, his mother seemed convinced that I would never be quite right for the job of being his wife or running his house. I’d heard her whisper it to him more times than either he or I would admit. Queen’s doubts had always made me feel bad, but this morning I wondered if she wasn’t right. I couldn’t help thinking too that Dana had told me not to marry Ryan. At the time, I’d thought she was jealous, since they’d gone out a few times. But now…

The woman’s hand gripped my arm again, and before I knew it, the dim room enveloped me and the door shut behind me. Lily wiggled awake in my arms. I could imagine her blinking to adjust to the darkness the way she did in her crib at home. She knew she was somewhere different, somewhere that seemed far away. I smiled down at her, hoping that she could see me.

That’s right, honey. They’ve put us out of the church of all things.

Chapter Four

“T he changing table is over there. There’s a rocking chair and baby swing in the corner. There are footstools under most of the chairs to use when you’re nursing. There are some nursing pillows over there,” the deacon’s wife said, pointing to a stack of pillows and blankets in the corner. “If the baby falls asleep, you can walk her down to the nursery and put her in one of the cribs. They’ll call you if she wakes up and starts to cry. The number will flash right out there.”

Sister Hawkins pointed toward the panel of glass running across the front of the room. Beyond it was my new church family, milling about and shaking hands. High above their heads was a black square with blinking red numbers, each one assigned to a different child when they signed in to their classes. I saw a woman duck through the crowd and rush out the side door.

I pushed Lily upright and over my shoulder to keep from showing my disappointment. The woman who’d run out had a three- or four-year-old, so this separation thing wasn’t as temporary as Sister Hawkins made it seem. What if Lily felt the same way about the toddlers’ class as she did the nursery? Would I be stuck in here for the next five years? Maybe I had it all wrong. I hoped so. “It’s very nice. All of it. I was just wondering, though…How long do I have to stay in here?”

Sister Hawkins gave me her signature look of disapproval. Her children probably knew it well. “It’s not a prison sentence, dear. It’s an honor. Being a mother is a beautiful thing. It’s a pity more young women don’t realize that. Again, we ask that you use the Cry Room as long as you’re breast-feeding your baby or whenever your child is crying during the service and not in the nursery. You’ll like it so much, though, you won’t want to leave. I’ve been in here seven years myself, ever since they built the new church.”

“Yeah, this is her own personal pulpit,” someone whispered, followed by a few giggles.

“Hush,” the woman said in the sharpest, sweetest tone I’d ever heard. “Here, honey, sit down.” She offered me a seat between her and another woman, who was the head of the Planning to Homeschool group or the Mothers of Many ministry, one of those women that I found both amazing and intimidating. I considered taking the seat she suggested to try to get to know that woman better. Rainy Styles was her name. I was sure about that. Ryan and I had been reading up on home-schooling and all other aspects of child rearing and I had a ton of questions to ask.

Still, I wasn’t ready to spend my first Sunday that close to Sister Hawkins’s scrutiny. Instead, I smiled at both of them and took a seat on the end of the back row in case Lily started crying and I needed to make a quick exit like that other woman had done. “Thanks, but I’ll sit here for now.”

The deacon’s wife looked a little insulted before fixing her smile, so much like my husband’s a few minutes earlier, firmly in place. The church mask, my old roommate used to call it as we set out on Sunday mornings. She’d tug at her cheeks and forehead, determined to leave all fakeness behind. I had no name for the false Sunday smiles, but I hated them. Church for me was a place to be vulnerable, not a place to cover up and be perfect. There was the rest of the week for that.

Attending the church that Ryan had grown up in, the church where his mother still attended, gave me plenty of opportunities to need Jesus. My old friends had wondered how things would go with me coming to a church where Ryan had a past and I didn’t, but Rochelle had said it best: “Go where your husband goes. God will go with you.”

I had amened the sentiment then, but sometimes now I wondered if God had gotten lost in the move. My mother-in-law didn’t just attend this church. From the way she’d had me kicked out of the sanctuary this morning with my husband’s approval, it seemed as if Liz just about ran the place. Now she’d have a whole team of women trying to whip me into a suitable wife.

Sister Hawkins attempted to whisper to someone about me. She didn’t do very well with it. She needed to take hissing lessons the Queen. “They’re talking about making her husband a minister, but I don’t see how it’s going to work with her acting a fool like that. Talking about her old pastor and such. Doesn’t she know how things work around here?”

Evidently I didn’t know much of anything at all.

The only light in the room came through the glass in front of us, so it was hard to make out who she’d been speaking to, but I knew that the speaker was the woman who’d escorted me in. My jailer. The pastor wanted to make my husband a minister? Surely this lady was confused, or at least I thought so at first, but after recounting Ryan’s nervousness this morning, I quickly realized she might be right. Gossips like that might get the details confused, but they generally got the big things right. Ryan was being considered for something. Why hadn’t Ryan told me anything? Maybe he had….

I’ve got to get back inside….

Hmm…

Dana’s husband, Adrian, was a minister now, though at the Messianic fellowship they attended, it wasn’t necessarily called that. Rochelle’s husband, Shan, was a deacon at his church, too. Still, my friends were real. Honest. Did I have to become some kind of Christian robot in order for my husband to become a leader?

I hugged my baby closer and shut my eyes before they stung with tears. Maybe Sister Hawkins was right. Though I felt I had a point, the sanctuary wasn’t the place to prove it. I should have just come into the Cry Room like I’d been asked and talked to Ryan about it at home. The thing was, we didn’t talk at home. Ryan barely talked to me at all, and when he did, that stupid cell phone seemed attached to the side of his head, or his BlackBerry, laptop or some other piece of equipment was in front of his face.

Lily pushed forward with her feet, digging her heels and toes into the cup of pudding that had once been my abdominals. I’d almost laughed when the woman mentioned nursing pillows. I didn’t need any—I was one. Though I’d stood up at my wedding almost two years ago with a stomach flat enough to cook on, giving birth to a ten-pound baby had stretched me into some kind of rag doll. Body parts had left their original positions and shifted to new locations. Where my six-pack had once lived, there was now an empty Hefty bag, hanging over with just a little bit of trash in it. Or at least that’s the way my husband described it right after the birth. I laughed with him then, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was, especially not this room.

Lord, I love being a mother, but does this mean I have to stop being a woman? A person?

A pregnant woman on the other side of the glass paused in front of us, checking her hair. She smiled at herself in what she must have thought, as I once did, was a mirror. I bit my lip remembering how my own face had stared back at me from that glass when I was pregnant. I’d finger-combed my little Afro and kissed my lips together thinking how cute I was, just like this woman was doing now. I wondered if she knew what awaited her on the other side of the glass, a life of watching other people worship through a window, of running out of God’s presence when your number blinked red. I wondered if she had any idea what this new motherhood was all about. I certainly didn’t.

“She’s missing the corners,” the woman next to me whispered. “I love when they use it for a mirror, but I always want to turn up the lights real quick and wave so that she can see there’s, like, thirty women in here watching her check her lipstick. We used to have fun in here, but that was before…”

I choked back my brewing tears and smiled, squinting a little to see the woman beside me more clearly. From her voice and sense of humor, I knew she was the one who’d made the crack before about this room being the other woman’s own personal pulpit. I wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant by that, either, but if I got to know this lady better, I’d be sure to ask. With her blond curls clearly in view, I realized with a shock, this must be the model-thin mother all the men spoke about, the one who always wore her old jeans back to church after each baby. The one husbands compared their wives to. Perhaps I should have taken the seat next to the other woman after all.

A friend must show herself friendly.

I sighed. Over and over, I’d prayed for friends at the church and every time, this scripture came to my mind. Today, I needed to suck it up and obey. I’d made enough messes for one morning. “You used to do stuff like that before? Before what? It sounds like this used to be a fun place.”

The woman moved closer, extending both hands. Her baby must have been the little boy in the swing. “It was a fun place. But like I said, that was before…all the cliques, all the rules.”

“Shh! Please be quiet back there. The Word of God is about to go forth. Have some respect,” the deacon’s wife said in a much less friendly tone than she’d started with in the hall.

The woman next to me laughed quietly. “That means her service is about to begin. Listen up, you’ll get an earful. I have a feeling you’re going to be our object lesson for the morning. Don’t let it get you down, though. And don’t let this room get you down, either. It used to be called the Breathing Room. It’s only the Cry Room if you let it be.”

“Quiet, puleeeeeze!”

Lily started crying at the sound of Sister Hawkins’s loud voice, the same way she did at home lately when Ryan screamed into the phone while talking to his business partners. I tried to hush her quickly so I wouldn’t be sent out of yet another room. I’d thought myself so blessed when I got married. Ryan had what every good girl dreamed of, especially one who’d been fat all her life and never had a date.

He was a Christian, a genius and fine, to boot. No other guy loved computers the way I did, and talking with him about open-source software and graphics programs had taken many of our dates long into the night. What had never come up was his workaholic tendencies. Oh, and his freaky relationship with his mother. That one was most definitely left out of the equation.

As Dana pointed out, though, I should have had a clue when his mother took over all the wedding planning and ordered those ugly pink bridesmaids’ dresses. Straight out of Gone with the Wind those things were. I think back now and know how good my friends were to even wear them. I wasn’t thinking about my friends at the time, though; I had only one thing on my mind, becoming Ryan’s wife.

Lily tugged at my shirt and I gladly obliged her hunger. At least I could meet someone’s expectations today. Slightly louder than the music had been, the pastor’s voice filled the room. The baby grabbed my finger at the sound of the man’s rich timbre, one she’d heard often when I replayed sermons in the house.

If I was honest, Pastor Dre, the younger son of the Reverend Redding, the man who’d pastored during Ryan’s youth, was a much better orator than my pastor back in Leverhill. This young pastor’s sermons were lively and contemporary and he had a great sense of humor, but like many other up-and-coming pastors I’d met, he didn’t seem to know how to connect with people. Sometimes he seemed so focused on his programs that I wasn’t sure he even liked the members, let alone loved them.

The people seemed to regard him more as a prince than a servant, and the gold lacquer thrones that he and his wife sat on behind the pulpit had almost sent me running out of the sanctuary my first Sunday here. Still, this was my husband’s church, and somehow, I had to make it mine, too. Even if it meant losing me in the process.

“We see through a glass darkly,” the preacher said. “We look in the mirror and think we see who we are, but we’re not looking in God’s mirror, we’re seeing the reflections of other people and who they want us to be. You need to take a look in the mirror of God’s Word and see what things are really looking like. That nice suit might be looking good in the natural, but in the spiritual, well, you could be wearing rags. You might look in the mirror and see a mother with dark circles under her eyes, but when reflected in God’s Word, you are a beautiful woman, wise and valued far above rubies.”

The tears I’d been holding back broke free and streamed down my face. I’d been looking at myself, at this church, at my husband through the mirrors of everyone but God. Sure, Ryan was different from my friends’ husbands, but I was different from them, too. So breast-feeding had made me gain weight instead of lose it as everyone said it would. I was doing something good for my baby. Maybe this room, this place I’d fought tooth and nail to stay out of, would be a blessing, too.

My neighbor’s fingers reached out for mine. She held my hand tightly for a few seconds and then let it go. She didn’t turn to look at me or even say a word, but it meant so much just to have someone touch me, to have someone care.

The room blurred as I held my baby closer and let the pain of the morning run out of me with hot, wet tears. Unfortunately, Lily was used to my silent crying and she finished her feeding quietly. The morning had started off with me on the pew next to Ryan, praying he’d notice my new perfume and the prepregnancy skirt I’d worked out every day the week before to squeeze into. (Again, there was elastic in the waist, but still…it counted for something.)

I tried to remind myself that Ryan had fallen in love with me while I was heavier than this and he loved me now that my pregnancy pounds seemed stuck to my frame.

But today, he didn’t notice my skirt. He didn’t notice me at all. He’d spent most of the time before service explaining to his mother why I didn’t usually pass Lily down the row to her and the other older women.

“Lily will start to spend more time with you as she gets older. For now, though, Tracey’s trying to be a good mom and I think she’s doing a great job.” He’d actually sounded proud of me in that moment and I remember smiling and feeling beautiful. Feeling strong.

Those feelings were short-lived.

Ryan was the king of church etiquette now that we’d moved back to his home church, though he’d been a free spirit when we were both in the singles’ group back at Broken Bread Fellowship in Leverhill. No matter how much you think you know a person, you never really know every part of them. You’re lucky if you really get to know yourself. Dana tried to tell me that, too. Oh well.

Although the embarrassment of being ushered out of the sanctuary by my own husband weighed heavy on my mind, it was his words that pressed the hardest against my heart, not his actions.

Get over it.

It was the same thing he told the managers of his company all the time. Still, he’d never said it to me.

Until now.

“Church family, please welcome the newest member of the ministerial team here at Promised Land Worship Center, Ryan Blackman! Many of you will remember his father, Robert, who served here for many years. Ryan is an accomplished businessman, as well. Some of you are running his software on your computers at home. His wife is back there with the baby, but you can shake both their hands on the way out today. Ryan will be heading up the youth division of Christian Education. Give him a hand!”

My tears stopped and the Cry Room came into view again, this time allowing me to see my husband approach the pulpit. Say what? The minister of whom? My heart seemed to stop as Ryan took a seat behind the pulpit, next to the pastor. I could hear Sister Hawkins groaning from where I sat. My heart seemed to stop, but I knew it couldn’t have, because I was still breathing. (I was, wasn’t I?)

“All these years that my Reginald has been a deacon here and then Pastor goes and puts another young guy on the ministerial staff. Well, that’s how it goes, I guess.” Sister Hawkins looked over at me, no longer beating around the bush. “You’d better get your act together though if you’re going to deal with those ministers’ wives…they’ll eat you alive, honey.”

“Like she would know,” my new friend the next seat over whispered, barely moving her lips.

I could only watch in shock as my husband was congratulated. Youth? Was this some kind of joke? Ryan barely had time for his own daughter. How could this be happening?

The woman next to me extended her hand again. (Why couldn’t I remember her name? Probably because I’d been calling her Skinny Woman in my mind since coming here.) Brenna Ross. I’d seen her name and face on the screen as one of the ministers’ wives. Her husband was the minister of music, a dark-haired hunk who all the visiting college girls went crazy for. At least I didn’t have that to deal with. She pulled me toward her and hugged me.

“I hope you were listening to the sermon,” Brenna whispered. “Get the tape and hear it again. See yourself as God sees you. You don’t have to look good in anyone else’s mirror. Keep your eyes on Christ. He’s got his eyes on you. Call me. I’m in the directory.”

I nodded and swallowed hard as she let me go, thankful for what seemed to be my first real friend since coming here. Thankful too that the glass separating me from my husband, the glass that I’d once thought was a mirror, seemed to have a different purpose after all—to make me see a new me, a woman made into Christ’s image instead of her own.