Pew

by Catherine Lacey

But a church is also a building, often a sturdy building, and it can keep the outside far from you and when the outside is far enough from you, that is when a person can sleep.

It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church—so vast, so many rooms—to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.

Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

Anyway the only good preacher I know isn’t sitting up in any church just to get looked at. She’s just the one that keeps the children all day, and sits in the hospice at night. She don’t say nothing about God, the Bible. Don’t have to. You see the way those children look at her—ask them what they know about. They know plenty.

A person draped in heavy cloth stood at the front of the church and said things in such a way to make those words seem obvious and true, how simple the world was, how no one need worry about anything, how everything was here, all the answers were here and we could all just accept them, roll over and accept them like a sleeping body accepts air.

An organ is a machine that can always cry louder than a human will.

Some kind of force or threat was in the room, all over the house.

What a freedom that was and what a burden that was—to not have a home to go home to, and to not have a home to go home to.

I had been sitting in a diner and a small child was screaming and weeping and a person behind the counter was frowning at that child, telling the person with that child to make it stop, angry about being an audience to all that tiny pain.

A decent woman will take care of finding a good man quickly because it only gets harder and harder.

He had a dog with him, pale fur, a dense animal that muscled along, kept his leash taut.

Since I had woken up on that pew, the meals had been endless and I wished I could have reached back and given one of them to those days of hunger in the past, or that I could have moved this plate to a place—there must have been such a place—where someone else was hungry.

Nelson ate as if in a contest with someone, his throat a constant swallow.

You’re right not to say anything. They hear what they want.

I listened to the pencil whispering across the page.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes?

I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

After some time, I got up, went down the stairs lightly so I didn’t wake anyone, went through the blue-black house and out into the yard to see the moon more clearly. How lucky we are to have the moon. It seemed that hardly anyone ever saw the sky anymore. Had we all forgotten it was there? All this time below it, we forget. Maybe the sky will leave us someday, then we will be able to realize what it was.

I half-sensed he wanted to frighten me, but I was not afraid—after all the moon was here, calm night, warm and easy air, and all of it was ours.

But ain’t that the problem? They don’t think of nothing and they don’t do nothing. They just want everyone to know they’s in charge, that’s all. We shouldn’t be seeing any of their durn faces. They just want to be looked at.

I don’t know why it is a person can feel so misplaced, even from the beginning, you know—even as a little child I felt there had been some kind of accident that got me born here.

I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is.

There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know till it’s too late.

I wanted to say something to Tammy and Hal, wanted to tell them what I was thinking, what I felt, but the words were all out of reach. The words were not mine to use.

As I looked at Tammy, a train went by, its noise massive, and I felt sure, at once, that Tammy had the ability to tolerate an enormous amount of pain before she let anyone know.

He laughed lightly, but only for a moment, and when I looked at him, I could see the part of Roger that never moved. Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

Glad about someone’s suffering because at least it ain’t your own.

Roger told me when you have a dream it’s just about you and you—that all the characters in the dream are just parts of you, talking to each other.

He looked at the moss the way I’d seen people look at children or babies sleeping in strollers, soft bodies someone larger had to protect.

Where I am from, we have many woods, many hikers. Here, not so many—people go to church instead. So we must let the forest know we appreciate it.

In our silence I felt as if something had been given back to me that I’d lost a long time ago.

I set that image back down in me.

Mr. Kercher began to cry without making a sound, but after a moment he seemed to fold up this cry and put it away like a handkerchief.

it’s natural to go looking for the dead in new faces. But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

fuck

That put an end to our discussion … she put an end to it. She didn’t want to be questioned.

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty

The woman with the ham was looking at me the way a mechanic looks down at an engine, quietly laying down years of knowledge.

Whatever had made it possible for her to look into my eyes, it seemed, had now expired.

and though it has been helpful, I think, at times, so often it feels like an affliction, to see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs. People wear those masks for a reason, like river dams and jar lids have a reason.

An organ is a machine, I remembered, that can always cry louder than a human will.

Everything seemed to hurt him. All of it, the whole world.

Everybody knows who he is, Leonard said, seeming to speak to everyone. Everybody knows and nobody says. Isn’t that always the way? Everyone knowing and nobody saying.

Religion, yes. Clergy, no. That’s what I say.

It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

I felt so sure then—of course I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then—and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.

There’s hardly any use in explaining it. It’s a ritual. We make them, people make them, and they don’t really mean anything, even the ones that supposedly mean something—even they don’t really mean anything. They’re just something to do.

All the growing up is to forget what we know at birth.