The Hired Girl

by Laura Amy Schlitz

But another part of me couldn’t imagine that she could ever die and leave me. It happened quite suddenly.

It sometimes seems to me as if I live in a world where everyone thinks I’m worth nothing — Luke and Father — and there’s nobody on my side at all, with Ma dead and Miss Chandler sent away. But I know I’m not nothing. And somehow I’m going to fight my way forward, though I don’t know how, and I don’t know where I’ll end up.

had been a while since I prayed. I’d been feeling a little disappointed in God, because I’d asked Him not to let Father be rude to Miss Chandler — but Father was — and then I’d prayed that my strike would succeed — but it didn’t, because Father burned my books. I know God can’t answer every prayer exactly the way you want Him to. But I couldn’t help thinking that He hadn’t been doing very well by me lately.

Clear as a bell I heard her voice — the Blessed Mother’s, I mean, not Malka’s. She said, “Be kind.” That irritated me, because the Blessed Mother is always telling me to be kind, as if that were the solution to everything. But I’ve found it often works — only it’s like scrubbing the floor; you have to put your back into it. It takes imagination to do the thing thoroughly.

Malka, your crucifix is not a symbol of the God you love, but of the Christians who have oppressed the Jews. Can you understand that?”

Oh, why can’t real life be as glorious as the opera? Of course, in real life people fall in love and get consumption and die, but it isn’t the same. In the opera, the music makes everything deeper and truer and grander.

The closest thing that I can say is that the absence of God, at that moment, was the presence of God. I felt it and it was true. It wasn’t what I’d prayed for. It didn’t answer my questions. It wasn’t forgiveness or chastisement or permission. It was just — He was just — God was just — real to me. There was darkness, and the darkness was God. There was absence, and the absence was God. There was my longing, and my longing was God. God wasn’t there, and at the same time I was more certain of Him than I’ve ever been in my life.

When I behold the ocean, I know that the world isn’t just the grind of small tasks and small thoughts. The world is wide and wild and grand. Someday I will sail my little bark into the great ocean of life, braving the winds and the tide.

Or perhaps I’ll be a famous journalist like Nellie Bly and investigate insane asylums and fascinating places like that.