Free The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison

where we sometimes ate one of her special salads or a bowl of fruit. Now, carrying a small blue suitcase, I followed her past the kitchen, down the hall, and into the guest room that opened onto a balcony overlooking Merrie Gardens.
    It was furnished simply with a narrow bed covered by a white bedspread, a bedside table with a lamp, a bureau, and a straight chair. Mrs. Clemons had placed a white towel and washcloth on the foot of the bed. I remember quite well the thinness of the bath towel, theclean, pure smell of the soap in the bathroom, and how cold the enamel of the tub felt on my skin when, taking a bath later, I leaned my naked back against it. I also remember the pale pink blanket that lay folded at the foot of the bed. I unfolded it to cover the spread before climbing into bed and curling up between the sheets. I loved the feeling of the cool pillowcase against my face, but the room felt strange to me and not altogether comfortable, a foreign place inside the familiar space of Mrs. Clemons’s apartment.
    I had spent hours before that weekend listening to her talk about her life. Though she spoke of many hurtful experiences, they had happened to her so long ago that they had shaped themselves into stories, edges smoothed like pieces of broken glass tumbled by the sea. She had a storyteller’s gift, and the forms that she created for holding the stories of her life also enabled me to hold them. No matter how great the loss or deep the grief, her stories satisfied a need in me, and ignited my imagination more than they distressed me.
    But that weekend was different; her fear about her present health was so great that it seeped into every story she told, weighing it down with an unspoken anxiety that I felt so acutely that I, too, became heavyhearted and anxious.
    Mrs. Clemons was a Christian Scientist. I puzzled about the pairing of those two words. A scientist was someone, usually a man, who peered through a microscope at germs squiggling on a glass slide, or at bits of leaves, flowers, or animal tissue. I’d seen photographs of some of these in
National Geographic
and sometimes in
Life
, and I saw that they were truly mysterious, so maybe there was some way to put the words
Christian
and
scientist
together. I knew Christianity was supposed to be about mystery, but judging from the words of the preacher in the Baptist church, I guessed it to be much more about moral rules and laws. Mystery had to do with the way light shone through the colors of the stained-glass Jesus, holding a shepherd’s staff in one hand and a little lamb in the other, or the way Maggie Roddenbery’s contralto voice filled the whole church when she sang.
    Healing from illness without a doctor or medicine from the drugstore seemed like a very large mystery. Though our preacher sometimes referred to Jesus causing the blind to see and the lame to walk, this information felt more like ancient history than present possibility. Of all the people I knew personally, only Mrs. Clemons talked in the present tense about healing through her religion.
    I had heard of other people who mixed healing and religion, but they were people who went to tent revivals, where they talked in tongues, played drums, and danced and rolled in the aisles in what they called religious ecstasy. My mother, who looked with disdain at overt displays of emotion, told me of her friend who attended such a tent meeting with her crippled son. Her friend had told her how the people gathered around the boy moaning prayers while the shouting preacher laid his hand on the boy’s head, commanding the evil spirits to leave his frail body. Mother felt embarrassed for what she called her friend’s appalling lapse of judgment. I wanted to believe that it was possible for that boy to get up from his wheelchair and walk, but felt my desire meant that I, too, had poor taste and would risk my mother’s harsh judgment if I admitted my true feelings.
    The only other people I’d heard of who