The Almost Sisters(6)
Around twelve years ago, I started worrying about Birchie living all alone in that big house full of staircases with her bad balance and worse eyesight. I’d wanted her to move to Virginia, into an assisted-living apartment near my house, but she would have none of it.
Meanwhile Wattie’s husband had passed, and both her sons lived far, Stephen in Chicago, Sam in Houston. They were worried, too. Wattie’s house was on an isolated road outside of town. She drove herself into Birchville almost every day with less and less regard for what lane the car was in. She and Birchie would sit out on the porch in fine weather or in front of the living room’s wide windows when it rained. They would knit and talk and supervise town life. It was a relief for all of us when Wattie failed her driver’s test and came to live with Birchie in the big Victorian. They could walk to the beauty parlor, the library, three restaurants, the yarn shop. The Piggly Wiggly didn’t have a delivery service per se, but for Emily Birch Briggs? The groceries got delivered.
The longer they lived together, the more symbiotic they became. Church had been the last amalgamation. On paper Wattie was still a member at Redemption, the all-black Baptist church near her old house. Birchie kept her membership at First Baptist, too, but for years now they had gone to services together, half the time walking to First Baptist and half the time being driven to Redemption by one of the deacons. This was a First Baptist week, and they bent their heads over their shared church bulletin until the service started.
Birchie took tidy notes in the margins of her Order of Worship, upright and attentive, giving Miss Wattie small, decorous nods when the preacher got it right, frowning slightly when he got it wrong. There were very few nods.
Miss Wattie remained stoic. Her large, heavy-lidded eyes hardly seemed to blink, but a close observer would notice that her full lips clamped in tandem with every Birchie head shake. The Reverend Richard Smith was new to the church, and very young, and prone to passionate sputtering about the Beatitudes. He told everyone to call him Pastor Rick, and sometimes, when he mentioned hell, it almost sounded like he was putting air quotes around the word. Worse, there were no detectable air quotes when he mentioned dinosaurs. Neither Birchie nor Miss Wattie could approve of him.
The old pastor—a properly powder-dry fellow of their generation—had died. Instead of promoting Jim Campbell, the blandly handsome, middle-aged unter-pastor, the church had called this new boy. He’d been born respectably enough in Alabama, but he’d gone to Golden Gate Seminary out in California.
As far as I could tell, they’d returned him with his old-school Southern Baptist doctrinal stick-in-the-butt still firmly lodged, but he also owned a pair of man sandals and did not eat red meat. Worse, he’d alternately coaxed and needled every single First Baptist member onto Facebook. Even Birchie and Wattie had signed up, strictly as a kindness. He’d betrayed their goodwill gesture by making the church newsletter completely virtual. To save trees, he said, but it meant they’d actually had to learn to turn on the computer I had gotten them. To my grandmother all this meant he was now “from” California, which was practically Babylon—the setting of a thousand movies about fornication that she flat refused to see.
“And he sweats when he preaches,” Birchie had told me on the phone. In her small, pursed mouth, “sweats” sounded like a curse word.
“I’m sure he can’t help it,” I’d told her.
“He most certainly could. The church has air conditioning.”
Birchie should know, as she had single-handedly paid to install it in the 1970s, when she was going through the change of life.
“The pulpit is right under the vent, but he won’t preach from it,” Wattie chimed in. They were on speakerphone. They’d always liked to have a share in each other’s conversations, but over the past couple of years they’d used the speakerphone more and more often. These days they took every call in tandem. It had happened so gradually I thought nothing of it. “He puts on that headset like a pop star, waving his arms around and jogging back and forth.”
“It’s true!” Birchie confirmed. “I feel like I’m watching that communist Fonda girl on one of her tacky aerobics tapes, what with all his gyrations splashed across those . . . screens.”
“Everybody’s using screens now, y’all,” I told them. “And no one watches tapes. Or does aerobics, for that matter.”
I heard a skeptical “Humph,” but I didn’t know if it was Birchie or Miss Wattie.
“They only put the lyrics on that screen,” Wattie said. “How can people sing without the notes?”
Birchie said, “I swan, Lois Gainey has not been on key once since those screens went up. He says the hymnals were getting ratty, but I offered to replace them. Twice.” I understood from her tone—anyone would have—that Miss Birchie’s considerable resources had not been available to help with the installation of screens.
All this change notwithstanding, Birchie was happy in her pew. Today the church was holding its Summer Kick-Off Fish Fry on the lawn. It was a tradition as long-standing and almost as venerated as Birchie herself.
As a kid I’d been to it every year; I’d spent every childhood summer down in Birchville. I wasn’t a football fan or a fish-the-Coosa River sort, but I’d loved Birchville anyway. Birchie bought me chalk in every color; I’d draw comic strips a block long, every sidewalk square a panel. She’d made Batman and Star Wars patterns on graph paper to entice me to learn needlepoint, and I’d needed no reward but the pie to want Wattie to teach me how to make her perfect crust. She and Wattie together sewed me a new Wonder Woman costume every year. I was allowed to run all over town wearing it, acting out Super Friends with local kids until I heard Birchie ringing the porch bell that called me home for supper. In Norfolk I could only wear it in the house. It embarrasses Rachel, my mother told me, her pink cheeks testifying that Rachel was not alone.