All Adults Here(66)
“Are you all right?” Birdie whispered into Astrid’s ear. “We can go, if you want; the girls will be fine.”
Astrid shook her head and commanded herself to get it together.
The pastor went on. “For those of you who have not attended a Quaker service before, we will all sit in silence for the next hour, creating a community through our bodies and our breath. If you feel moved to speak, please stand up and do so. That is all. Thank you.” She bowed her head, and everyone else did too.
Astrid came from a family—two families, really—for whom being lost in your own thoughts during a religious service was something you weren’t supposed to admit. She liked the pretense of paying attention to someone with a strong voice, an expert in the field of faith, telling a roomful of people what they should believe and why. This felt sort of like not getting one’s money’s worth, as a religious experience. Was it a religion? She should know this. Astrid wiped her eyes and then turned to look at Porter. She’d shut her eyes tightly and had a faint smile on her face. Her hands roamed her belly. She was midconversation, clearly, the constant nonverbal dialogue that first-time mothers had with their unborn children. Astrid remembered being pregnant with Elliot, how terrified and excited she’d been, how she had whispered to him in the middle of the night, before he had a face, before he had a name. Was Elliot listening then?
A woman sitting on the other side of the room stood up. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and said something about Barbara’s potato salad, and then sat back down. Porter’s eyes flickered open and then closed again. Every few minutes, someone else would stand up, say a few words, and sit back down. Astrid felt herself getting agitated, and shifting in her seat. After a long pause, she straightened her legs.
“Hello,” she said. She held on to Birdie’s hand. Both Porter and Cecelia looked up at her, surprised. “My name is Astrid Strick, and I’ve known Barbara for forty years. I’ve never done this before, so apologies if I’m not doing it right, but what I want to say is this: Barbara told the truth.” All around the room, people nodded in agreement. “And that’s not an easy thing to do. That’s all I want to say.” Astrid gave an awkward wave with her free hand and sat back down.
“Good job, Gammy,” Cecelia whispered, nuzzling her face into Astrid’s bony arm. Astrid lifted her arm and hung it around Cecelia’s back. What would have happened in her life if she had been honest from the start? With her children, with herself, with her husband, with Birdie. What if all the fuzzy-type mothers had been right, and she’d been wrong? Astrid felt full of things she wanted to announce to a silent, respectful group. It was yet another example of Barbara’s earnestness winning out over whatever it was that had ruled Astrid’s life heretofore— triage, was how she thought of it. It had been triage with three small children, and then it had been triage as a young widow. She hadn’t had time to plan things perfectly, or to parent intentionally, the way some women she knew had, with well-considered questions on the tours of local preschools. Astrid had always been trying to survive one day so that she could live the next. It was something she had always thought she’d grow out of, but somehow, there always seemed to be so many things to do in a single day. Barbara had seemed to have time for everyone, if not herself.
Bob Baker sat in the front pew, surrounded on both sides by gaggles of women, each of their backs curled into a seashell, the stance of any woman putting a Band-Aid on a child’s boo-boo. They were easy enough to identify from behind—Astrid counted at least two widows in the bunch, plus a woman whose husband lived at Heron Meadows. There were some people who just needed to be married, who felt like they were only wearing one shoe when they were alone. Astrid had some friends like that—or she had had some friends like that. Women who needed a partner that badly tended to be unreliable friends, Astrid found, which was why they needed a new partner so badly when their first one died, smothered by all the marital attention.
The point, surely, was not to look around the room at everyone else, but Astrid couldn’t help it. She felt like she was on a ship, sailing across an ocean. In addition to Susan from the bookstore, there was Olympia, from Spiro’s, and the ditzy yoga teacher who’d been there when Barbara was hit. What would happen when she, Astrid, died? Would Birdie and Porter organize a service together? It would be just like this, Astrid thought, a roomful of old ladies and kind community members. Which of them would actually care that she had died? Cecelia would care, the sweet girl, but who knew where she’d be by then—back in Brooklyn, off at college, or somewhere else, too busy for her grandmother. There weren’t very many men in the room, and so Astrid started to count them. She started at the left-hand side of the room, all the way at the end of the aisle, and when she’d made it three-quarters of the way around the room, she counted Elliot as number four.
He was sitting alone—that is, he wasn’t with anyone she knew, but flanked on either side by white-haired ladies. Astrid gestured in the air, trying to get his attention, but Elliot didn’t notice, and instead Astrid got some weird looks from other people. Eventually the pastor stood up again and pronounced the service over.
“Come, come,” Astrid said, hoisting both Cecelia and Porter up by their armpits, and then guiding them into the aisle. Birdie followed behind, the caboose. “Excuse me,” Astrid said, and squeezed her way into a thicket of mourners. Astrid tried to get across the room to where Elliot had been sitting but was instead herded into the stairwell and down into the basement reception area. They were pushed toward long folding tables with carefully arranged cheese plates and brownie bites. She dodged Barbara’s sister by the pitchers of lemonade and iced tea, still swiveling, trying to find her son. When he finally made it through the crowd to them, Astrid found that she was sweating, and when she hugged him hello, she said, “It’s so warm in here, isn’t it?”