Inevitable and Only(27)
Which was why I couldn’t drop anything when Mom, who was sitting on the couch, looked up from her laptop and said, “Oh, good. Cadie. I’m so glad you’re home. Your dad can’t take off any more time from the bookshop, and Olga wants me to bring Josh in for an extra lesson on his competition piece, so can you take Elizabeth to church tomorrow morning?”
CHAPTER TEN
Elizabeth didn’t seem thrilled about the arrangement either, but Mom was adamant that she wouldn’t have Elizabeth wandering around town on her own.
“You can walk to Saints Philip and James over on North Charles. It’s only a mile,” she said. “And you can stop at the 7-Eleven and pick up milk on your way home.”
“Baby cow juice,” I muttered, even though I knew Mom hated it when Dad said that. She said it was disgusting and rude to those who preferred to drink “milk as nature intended it, not as vegans invented it.”
“You don’t have to stay for the service if you don’t want to,” Mom reminded me, under her breath, while she packed lunch for her and Josh, and I waited for Elizabeth to come downstairs. “Go sit in the sculpture garden while she’s at Mass, or the Daily Grind. Just make sure she gets there and back in one piece.”
Elizabeth came into the kitchen then, wearing her church clothes: khaki slacks, loafers, a black cardigan over a silky blue top. I looked down at my ripped jeans and sweatshirt, then ran back upstairs and changed into leggings, a skirt, and a button-down denim shirt. It had patches sewn all over it but at least it was clean. Then I swiped a brush through my hair and fished out a pair of black flats from under my bed. They were too small. I ditched them and grabbed my boots.
It was a nice day for a walk, although even 11:00 (“late Mass”) was too early for anything on a Sunday morning, in my opinion. We walked down 34th Street to Keswick, then turned left on 33rd and cut across the Johns Hopkins undergrad campus to North Charles Street.
“Cadie,” said Elizabeth tentatively, as if she still wasn’t sure about using my nickname.
“Yeah?”
“I’m just—I’m curious about something, but I don’t want to be rude.” She paused.
“Okay …” I prompted. “Shoot.”
“Well, I know you’re not religious at all. I mean, you said you’re more Quaker than anything. But do you still observe any Jewish customs?”
I sighed. “I never had a bat mitzvah or anything, if that’s what you mean. We don’t go to synagogue or Hebrew school. My mom’s family moved from Spain to DC when she was nine and she never felt like she fit in with the kids in their new synagogue community. After her bat mitzvah, she finally refused to do any more religious stuff at all.”
It was so weird to think of Mom rebelling against her parents. My mind wandered briefly, trying to picture Mom as a teenager.
“So … what about Ross’s family?”
“Well, Dad grew up in New York with Communist parents, Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Morris, who thought religion was ‘the opiate of the masses.’ So he had no problem with raising us nonreligious.” I wondered if this was awkward for Elizabeth, hearing about grandparents she’d never met—people she’d never known existed. “Mom’s parents didn’t like it and there used to be a big argument every year about whether they could take us to High Holy Day services at their synagogue in DC, but now they live in Florida, and they’re too far away to do anything about it.”
We’d finally reached the church. Saints Philip and James was a big marble cathedral just south of the Baltimore Museum of Art. We climbed the steps and I hesitated outside the door.
“I probably shouldn’t stay,” I said. “I was thinking about waiting for you over at the Daily Grind.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Elizabeth said. “I can meet you there when Mass is over.”
I still didn’t turn away, though. I was curious about Mass. I’d never been to one before. And it seemed that lots of Johns Hopkins students went to services here. Lots of male Hopkins students. Cute ones.
“It’s fine if you want to stay,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t have to be baptized or confirmed or anything to go to Mass. No one checks your Catholic ID card.”
“You have a Catholic ID card?”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows and did not deign to answer. I gave her points for sarcasm.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know any of the prayers, or what to do, or—”
“It’s no big deal. I’ll show you how to follow along with the readings, and you can just stand up and sit down when everyone else does.” She grinned at me. “I guess you could say it’s really not that different from Meeting.”
She was totally wrong about that.
The priest stood up in a little pulpit that was sort of attached to the wall, like a gravy boat on the side of a big ship. I couldn’t stop staring at all the gold leaf on the walls, the greenish marble columns, the stained glass, the polished brass of the enormous pipe organ. Most of the service went over my head; it was in English, not in Latin, but the echo in that enormous marble space blurred the priest’s words like melted butter. It was a complex choreography, with standing and sitting and kneeling and sitting again. There was calling and responding in an order that I didn’t understand, and the responses sounded like slight variations on the same one or two phrases. At the end of the whole thing, everyone turned and shook hands with the people around them and said, “Peace be with you.” That part was all right with me, but I felt like a bit of an imposter saying it.