Free The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison Page A

were involved with healing and religion were the Catholics who flooded to Lourdes with dreams of miracles rendered through the water from a special spring. Fascinated, I’d read that the young Bernadette Soubirous was directed to the spring by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. But the Virgin Mary had no place in the Baptist Church, and Catholics seemed like a different species altogether, as foreign as Yankees.
    Christian Science felt foreign, too, but it was a part of who Mrs. Clemons was, so I’d begun to learn bits and pieces about it. She never talked about a church but referred to the Christian Science Reading Room, a concept that seemed strange to me and not at all like going to church. She didn’t read
The Atlanta Journal
like my parents did but read
The Christian Science Monitor
, which she kept folded on the table beside her reading chair. Once, she told me, she tripped and brokeher ankle when cutting through Paradise Park on her way home from the grocery store. Despite the urgings of friends, she said, she stood fast in her faith and refused to go to a doctor, waiting and watching as the broken bone knit itself together again.
    She’d been most adamant in her claims, which added to my anxiety that weekend; her fear about her present health felt to me like a crisis of faith. I say I
felt
rather than
thought
, because my perceptions were nothing I could articulate. But I felt the threat with a chilling surety. Her crisis precipitated a crisis in me. Her faith in Christian Science, strange as it was to me, was something I needed her to hold on to. I needed Mrs. Clemons to be unbroken and predictable in my world.
    The weekend itself, with all its blank spaces and its few clearly remembered details, was pivotal in the relationship between us. Young as I was, I was able to stand with her during the storm of her doubt. I felt I’d proven myself to her in some essential way. That she had asked me to be with her, difficult though it was, felt like a privilege.
    Fortunately, my stay was balanced by time spent with Mrs. Forbes. I had my usual painting lesson on Saturday afternoon, while Mrs. Clemons was at a special meeting of a group of Christian Scientists until early evening. After I’d painted for a long time, Mrs. Forbes suggested I stop and let her fix us an early supper. She led me into her kitchen on the other side of the house, took a large onion and a jar of mayonnaise out of the refrigerator, and set both on the enameled table at which I sat, watching. She peeled the onion, put it on the chopping board, and cut two enormously thick, sharply fragrant slices. She opened a loaf of bread and took out four pieces, which she put on two small plates. Then she spread mayonnaise on the bread, and onto one piece on each plate she placed an onion slice.
    I sat waiting for the other ingredients of the sandwich, but there were none. She plopped the remaining pieces of bread on their mates, poured two glasses of milk, and sat down. An onion sandwich. In our family, onions went with hamburgers. I’d never heard of a sandwich with nothing but onion on it. And this was nothing likethe food Mrs. Clemons served. She made wonderful cakes and cookies. Sometimes she mixed exotic salads of grapes, walnuts, celery, lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, covered with a creamy dressing totally unlike those my mother made.
    “This is one of my very favorite treats,” Mrs. Forbes said, taking a bite of her sandwich. I took a bite of mine and, to my surprise, liked it.
    When the painting lesson ended, Mrs. Forbes went into the foyer and pulled the string that dangled from a small bell at the head of the stairs. “Yoo-hoo!” she called, ringing the bell. “Yoo-hoo!” Mrs. Clemons came down then and played “To a Wild Rose” on the piano before we went upstairs for the night.
    That night Mrs. Clemons and I sat together on the balcony that opened from the guest room and overlooked Merrie Gardens. The evening was cool, and we both wore