Free Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy

Presbyterian Crosswalk
    S ometimes Beth floated. Two or three feet off the ground, and not for very long, ten seconds or so. She wasn’t aware of floating when she was actually doing it, however. She had to land and feel a glowing sensation before she realized that she had just been up in the air.
    The first time it happened she was on the church steps. She looked back down the walk and knew that she had floated up it. A couple of days later she floated down the outside cellar stairs of her house. She ran inside and told her grandmother, who whipped out the pen and the little pad she carried in her skirt pocket and drew a circle with a hooked nose.
    Beth looked at it. “Has Aunt Cora floated, too?” she asked.
    Her grandmother nodded.
    “When?”
    Her grandmother held up six fingers.
    “Six years ago?”
    Shaking her head, her grandmother held her hand at thigh level.
    “Oh,” Beth said, “when she was six.”
    When Beth was six, five years ago, her mother ran off with a man down the street who wore a toupee that curled up in humid weather. Beth’s grandmother, her father’s mother, came to live with her and her father. Thirty years before that, Beth’s grandmother had had her tonsils taken out by a quack who ripped out her vocal chords and the underside of her tongue.
    It was a tragedy, because she and her twin sister, Cora, hadbeen on the verge of stardom (or so Cora said) as a professional singing team. They had made two long-play records: “The Carlisle Sisters, Sea to Sea” and “Christmas with the Carlisle Sisters.” Beth’s grandmother liked to play the records at high volume and to mouth the words. “My prairie home is beautiful, but oh …” If Beth sang along, her grandmother might stand next to her and sway and swish her skirt as though Beth were Cora and the two of them were back on stage.
    The cover of the “Sea to Sea” album had a photograph of Beth’s grandmother and Aunt Cora wearing middies and sailor hats and shielding their eyes with one hand as they peered off in different directions. Their hair, blond and billowing out from under their hats, was glamorous, but Beth secretly felt that even if her grandmother hadn’t lost her voice she and Cora would never have been big stars because they had hooked noses, what Cora called Roman noses. Beth was relieved that she hadn’t inherited their noses, although she regretted not having got their soft, wavy hair, which they both still wore long, in a braid or falling in silvery drifts down their backs. Beth’s grandmother still put on blue eye shadow and red lipstick, too, every morning. And around the house she wore her old, flashy, full-length stage skirts, faded now—red, orange or yellow, or flowered, or with swirls of broken-off sequins. Beth’s grandmother didn’t care about sloppiness or dirt. With the important exception of Beth’s father’s den, the house was a mess—Beth was just beginning to realize and be faintly ashamed of this.
    On each of Beth’s grandmother’s skirts was a sewed-on pocket for her pencil and pad. Due to arthritis in her thumb she held the pencil between her middle finger and forefinger, but she still drew faster than anyone Beth had ever seen. She always drew people instead of writing out their name or their initials. Beth, for instance, was a circle with tight, curly hair. Beth’s friend Amy was an exclamation mark. If the phone rang and nobody was home, her grandmother answered it and tapped herpencil three times on the receiver to let whoever was on the other end know that it was her and that they should leave a message. “Call,” she would write, and then do a drawing.
    A drawing of a man’s hat was Beth’s father. He was a hardworking lawyer who stayed late at the office. Beth had a hazy memory of him giving her a bath once, it must have been before her mother ran off. The memory embarrassed her. She wondered if he wished that she had gone with her mother, if, in fact, she was supposed to have