Although this house was held out to me as a bonus when Ed accepted this call, it’s really anything but. Neither Ed nor I have wealthy families, and between us we’re still paying off student loans that should have put one of us through medical school and on the road to a lucrative career.  So buying a house won’t be an option f until our daughters have finished college.  Not unless there’s a mortgage company that takes down payments in sixties Superhero comic books and Great Aunt Martha’s willowware.  We are stuck, it seems with “bonuses” like this drafty Dutch Colonial and all the dust we can vacuum.  

            The vast majority of our first floor is taken up by that cavernous space realtors call a “country” kitchen and interior decorators call a “design error.”  Right now the counters, which lay at opposite ends of a twenty foot space bisected by a long wooden table, were littered with mixing bowls, cookie sheets and Aunt Martha’s platter half filled with chocolate chip cookies.

            I’d had the notion on waking that morning that I ought to serve refreshments as the Society board traipsed through our backyard discussing the perfect height and breadth of lilac bushes.  Personally, I wanted my lilacs to look like an old growth forest.  I didn’t want a view of the church next door since it already took up too many of my waking moments.  But I suspected that when the Society board sat in the pews on Sunday morning, they wanted a view of the parsonage.

            Just in case I had decided on a whim that week to paint the old frame house flamingo pink.

            I gave the remaining dough a few slaps with a wooden spoon and checked to be sure the oven was still on.  Then I opened a bag of walnut pieces and added them so that my guests would have choices.

            I doubted my culinary diplomacy was going to make much of an impression.  Not a woman in the Women’s Society would serve anything as ordinary as Toll House cookies to a gathering of this kind. Of course there isn’t a woman in the society who still has young children, or a job, or a husband who works at home and trails papers and books through the house with the intensity of Hansel scattering bread crumbs.  Most of the members of the board are thoughtful and forgiving.  I’m young, of a generation not known for gracious entertaining until Martha Stewart reared her expensively shorn head.  They will drink my Hawaiian Punch and ask for the recipe.

            With the exception of Gelsey Falowell.

            The ghostly enigma known within the confines of the parsonage as Lady Falowell followed me from counter to counter as I dropped the nut-studded dough on baking sheets that mysteriously darkened with every use.

            Lady Fallowell’s baking sheets probably blinded the careless observer.  Her baking sheets had probably been handed down through generations by women whose mission on earth was to keep dust, dirt and baked-on grease from staining any of life’s little surfaces, aluminum monuments to the importance of appearances. If our Lady possesses anything as plebeian as a cookie sheet.

            Gelsey Falowell is the chairperson of the Women’s Society.  In the odd year when she isn’t the chairperson, she stands behind whatever pliant mannequin agreed to take the job and tells that unfortunate soul when to speak and how to move. Everyone knows that Gelsey continues to run the Society, but if anyone minds, I’m none the wiser.  In churches some traditions are so deeply ingrained that logic--a quality on which we religious liberals pride ourselves--is lost in the whorls and grooves.

            To say that everyone likes Gelsey would be incorrect.  To say that anyone loves her is probably incorrect, too.  Gelsey is like the furniture that’s inevitably chosen for a pastor’s study.  Tasteful, awesomely formal, and so uncomfortable that no one who experiences it first-hand ever wants to linger. 

            Gelsey is ageless.  Sometimes in the minutes before I fall asleep at night I lay imaginary wagers.  Seventy and not a year younger is my best guess, although I could be off by as much as a decade. She carries her tall body like a debutante and walks with the sure, rolling gait of a Tennessee Walker. Her hair is a striking blue-silver and her eyes are nearly the same, both set off by the deep tan of a lifetime of tennis matches.  I’ve seen young men trail her body with their eyes, halting ever so momentarily on a tight little rear that never, in the Lady’s purpose-filled life, sat idly.

            Gelsey is a woman of power and inbred good taste. 

            Gelsey is a woman whose bad side is a steep slope that leads to personal oblivion. 

            Gelsey despises my husband.

            Ed doesn’t believe this last part yet, and pointing it out results in questions about childhood trust issues and whether I’m having a particularly bad time with PMS.  It’s not that my husband isn’t astute, but rather that he chooses to use his healthy intellect on questions like: “Why are we here?”  And my personal favorite: “If salvation is only granted to a few, then why aren’t the rest of us whooping it up?”

            It’s not that Ed believes everyone is good.  Theoretically, of course, he believes we are born that way.  But Ed is practical and experienced enough to know that things begin to change the moment that first two AM bottle is late or that first diaper drips unnoticed.  He’s seen the best and worst of people, an unfortunate hazard of his job.  That he chooses not to see the truth about Gelsey is more a function of personal blinders than of a rosy world view.

            If Gelsey doesn’t like Ed, then his life is going to become unbearably complicated.  And Ed accepted the call to this nondescript church in this small, nondescript college town in this nondescript quadrant of the state of Ohio because he yearned for silence and simplicity.

            Ed was, is, and always will be a scholar and not a politician.

            I shoved a pan of cookies in the smoking oven.  Noise echoed from upstairs now, an annoyed, ambiguous bleating, followed by my daughter Deena’s shuffling feet.  At eleven our oldest daughter moves everywhere as if she’s slogging through mud flats on her way to an execution. 

            Deena’s on her way to adolescence before I’ve had time to read up on it.

            After the fulsome prelude, her arrival was a disappointment.  In her father’s flannel shirt and last year’s gymnastic’s shorts, she looked almost normal, almost happy--in its purest state an emotion I didn’t expect to witness again for perhaps another ten years. 

            She pulled out a chair, making certain to scrape the floor as she did, and flopped down on it, resting her chin in cupped hands.  Since she hadn’t yet spoken, I figured we were off to a favorable start.

            Time rode sweetly by.  Through the window I watched Teddy and her father filling in the final hole.  Moonpie was nowhere to be seen.  I hoped for the best.

            “I don’t know why I have to get up,” Deena said at last.

            “I’d offer you a cookie, but you have to eat something healthier first.”  I pulled the sheet out of the oven and shoved the final one in its place.

            “I’m going to strangle Teddy when she gets inside.  I had the pillow over my head, and I could still hear her singing that stupid hymn.”

            “You’ll need strength.  She’s a wiry little thing.”

            “How come I had to get up?  Those ladies aren’t going in my room.”  She lifted her head and looked at me with impossibly blue eyes.  “Are they?”

            I shrugged.   Frankly I was suspicious someone in the Society conducted surreptitious inspections of the house when we were gone. A couple of times on returning from errands I’d found things out of place or once, odd impressions in my freshly waxed kitchen floor.  At least if Gelsey and crew checked the house today, I’d be here for their tour.