“This girl needs to lie down,” Edna says.
I say, “Perhaps it is time for her delicious country breakfast.”
At this idea, Edna lifts her hands high before her, palms up. For a moment she and Citrus share what appears to be the same gesture, though they are surely in quite different states of mind. Edna says, “I am such a fool. And a bad hostess to boot. Keep an eye on this poor girl while I go get her what she needs to fix her up.”
Edna rushes away and I am left with a renewed outpouring of reverence from this mouth that I must admit scares me. I am not used to lips in general, but this blackened slash of a mouth — this deep-space rift that is compulsively shaping words—is particularly frightening for me, its apparent conviction of my beneficent importance notwithstanding. Perhaps Citrus does indeed need a makeover from the cosmetological wisdom of Bovary, Alabama. Though her boyfriend seemed quite devoted to her in our Welcome-to-the-Spaceship Party. But I share my wife Edna Bradshaw’s concern with Citrus’s chosen appearance.
She falls forward again on her face, crying. “Lord, I will wash your feet with my hair.”
“Please,” I say, bending now and taking her by the arms. Though I do not give her my heartbeat through my fingertips. I merely pull at her, and she goes quite heavy in my hands, straining downward.
“Oh my,” she says. “All these toes. So many toes.”
Like the fingers on my hands, there are eight toes on each of my feet, exposed now, from my casual interviewing attire, in the very largest-sized flip flops.
“Of course,” she cries. “Of course, Lord, you are blessed with toes, your toes are multiplied according to your righteousness.” And she strains harder, saying, “I will wash your feet with my hair like the sinner woman at the house of the Pharisee.”
And my hands lose their grip and she dips her head and sharp pains begin to bite and bite at me. I look. Her hair is as black as her lips and done into lacquered spikes. These poke and poke at my feet.
“Please,” I say, trying again to pull her up. I am very strong for my species, which, pound for pound, is notably stronger than the primary species of this planet, but I am struggling with this woman’s ardor. I say, “Please. Your hair is not suited for the task you have given it,” and at last I am succeeding in pulling her away, though she continues to strive to thrash her head against my feet.
She says, “I’m not worthy, Lord. It’s true.” And she abruptly yields completely. As if our gravitation devices have suddenly failed, she rises up quickly at my efforts, and now she is standing before me. Her eyes search my face. “I didn’t know God had so many toes.”
I say, “That is an issue for which I can offer no insight. I am certain, however, that you have insufficient evidence of God’s toes by numbering mine.”
I have confused her with my words. She is staring hard into my face. I wave my hand between us. I wave it again over her head. She sighs and closes her eyes and opens them and her eyes widen and she says, “What the fuck?”
I believe that I have revived her.
“Miss Citrus,” I say, for that is her chosen name at this level of consciousness.
“Oh my God,” she says.
For a moment, with her renewed invocation of a deity, I think she has slipped back once again to her twilight state. But, as this world’s words so often do, hers slip away from their apparent meaning, for she adds, “You look like a fucking spaceman.”
“More precisely, a standing spaceman.”
She jerks backward, begins to look frantically around her. I wave my hand once more between us and she grows calm. She is ready to speak now.
I call her by her official name, which I have learned in full from her Texas driver’s license. “Judith Marie Nash,” I say.
And she acknowledges this name. “Yes?” she says.
“Please sit here.” I motion to the visitor’s chair in the center of the room. It is already bathed in a soft white light. She moves to it without further urging and she turns and sits. I go to my place before her and sit in the shadows.
“Please now,” I say. “Speak to me.”
And I am Judith Marie Nash. I used to dream about the nails in Jesus’ hands and feet. Not the way my daddy would have me dream, I’m sure. My daddy is a man of God. My daddy would take his Bible and it was bound in beautiful calf-skin leather and the paper was so thin and crinkly and yet so strong that not a page of it was torn no matter how many times somebody had rushed through looking for the Word, the Holy Word, but he would take his Bible and hold it up when my brother and me and my mama was sitting around the living room with him and we were all doing our prayers and our studying, he’d hold it up high. And that Bible, full of God’s Holy Word, would droop in his hand, it would just go limp over his fingers, the thick shaft of pages, the two page-marker ribbons dangling down. It was so supple. So supple and skin-smooth. And I would have these thoughts. And they would seem to come straight from the mouth of God, straight from His Word. This Bible being held up like that felt like a real private thing. I mean a private thing about a man’s body. You know the thing I mean. I don’t know why, when I’m talking about how I grew up and all, that I start feeling the taboos again about these words — I mean, of course, a man’s cock. I knew — part of me knew — that it was a terrible thing I was thinking. But another part of me thought it was all right. And it wasn’t like the part that felt it was all right was the future me, the me that my father would be expecting to go straight to hell. It was the me still believing in the Holy Word. Because every word was true in that book. Every one. True like cosmic true. True in your soul and in the marrow of your bones and true by every hair on your head, which are all numbered by God — you can read that in Matthew chapter ten verse thirty. And, of course, every other hair is numbered, too. How could anything escape the notice of God? He put hair on your head and he also put it around your cock, if you’re a guy, or your pussy, of course, if you’re a girl, and they’ve got to all be numbered, too, those hairs. So the fact that the Bible in my daddy’s hand made me think of a guy’s cock, it seemed right to me, by the Book.
Just consider King David. How beloved he was by God. How great he was in God’s eyes. How God loved him to go out and deal with the bodies of Israel’s enemies. Because in the Word, which is true for all eternity — my own father taught that as the cornerstone of everything else — in the first book of Samuel in the Bible David fell in love with the daughter of Saul, who was beloved, as well, being made the first King of Israel by God as prophesied by Samuel, and David loved Saul’s daughter and what did he bring as a dowry for her? He brought the foreskins off the cocks of two hundred Philistines. He did. You can look it up in First Samuel chapter eighteen. I dreamed about that for a long while, too, even while I was awake. When I daydreamed of my own wedding, blessed by its true Bible-based holiness, and my daddy giving me away to a godly Christian boy, I dreamed of a dowry like this marriage that God had brought to his beloved David. I saw a great black case of fine, supple, calf-skin leather, and it would be opened, and there they would be, laid out on blue velvet inside, those wonderful intimate pieces of flesh off the cocks of two hundred boys. Mostly the boys at Sam Houston High School in Waco, Texas, where I was a sophomore when I first started having this dream.
Of course, my daddy couldn’t deal with the literal truth of that God-approved dowry of foreskins. He believed the things it was convenient for him to believe. Like the earth is six thousand years old. That was real important to him for some reason. But ask him why if a man is wounded in his testicles he’s cast out of the church, which is true forever and ever amen from the book of Deuteronomy chapter twenty-three, and you won’t get real clear answers from him, even though, as the father in the family, he’s God’s direct representative with divine inspiration — that’s in the Bible, too, somewhere, and he wouldn’t let us forget it, but a guy who gets in an accident and his balls get hurt, why he has to be cast out of God’s house is something my daddy refuses to address. He even took my Bible away from me for asking. But my daddy put his own balls in a wringer over that. He wanted me to study the Bible so that I’d be a worthy daughter of a Godly man like him, which everybody in Waco knew about him. But how could I do that if he had my Bible? So he had to give it back to me and then he put me under threat of hell not to read certain parts of the One and Only Holy Book of the Creator of the Universe, literally true in every word. But then there was the guy that God got real pissed at and smote dead just because he touched the ark of the covenant when he was only trying to keep it from falling on the ground when the oxen that was pulling the cart it was on stumbled. Course my daddy would say that God could get killingly angry at anybody He chose to and nobody could question that, because He’s God. And the same goes for God’s direct representative in every family on Earth. Him, for example, my daddy.