Free Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page A

gone, because when he came home from work and she was still there, he seemed surprised. “Who do we have here?” he might say. He wanted peace and quiet. When Beth got rambunctious, he narrowed his eyes as though she gave off a bright, painful light.
    Beth knew that he still loved her mother. In the top drawer of his dresser, in an old wallet he never used, he had a snapshot of her mother wearing only a black slip. Beth remembered that slip, and her mother’s tight black dress with the zipper down the back. And her long red fingernails that she clicked on tables. “Your mother was too young to marry,” was her father’s sole disclosure. Her grandmother disclosed nothing, pretending to be deaf if Beth asked about her mother. Beth remembered how her mother used to phone her father for money and how, if her grandmother answered and took the message, she would draw a big dollar sign and then an upside-down V sitting in the middle of a line—a witch’s hat.
    A drawing of an upside-down V without a line was church. When a Presbyterian church was built within walking distance, Beth and her grandmother started going to it, and her grandmother began reading the Bible and counselling Beth by way of biblical quotations. A few months later a crosswalk appeared at the end of the street, and for several years Beth thought that it was a “Presbyterian” instead of a “Pedestrian” crosswalk and that the sign above it said Watch for Presbyterians.
    Her Sunday school teacher was an old, teary-eyed womanwho started every class by singing “When Mothers of Salem,” while the children hung up their coats and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her. That hymn, specifically the part about Jesus wanting to hold children to His “bosom,” made Beth feel that there was something not right about Jesus, and consequently it was responsible for her six months of anxiety that she would end up in hell. Every night, after saying her prayers, she would spend a few minutes chanting “I love Jesus, I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” the idea being that she could talk herself into it. She didn’t expect to feel earthly love; she awaited the unknown feeling called glory.
    When she began to float, she said to herself, “This is glory.”
    She floated once, sometimes twice a week. Around Christmas it began to happen less often—every ten days to two weeks. Then it dwindled down to only about once a month. She started to chant “I love Jesus” again, not because she was worried any more about going to hell, she just wanted to float.
    By the beginning of the summer holidays she hadn’t floated in almost seven weeks. She phoned her Aunt Cora who said that, yes, floating was glory all right, but that Beth should consider herself lucky it had happened even once. “Nothing that good lasts long,” she sighed. Beth couldn’t stop hoping, though. She went to the park and climbed a tree. Her plan was to jump and have Jesus float her to the ground. But as she stood on a limb, working up her courage, she remembered God seeing the little sparrow fall and letting it fall anyway, and she climbed down.
    She felt that she had just had a close call. She lay on her back on the picnic table, gazing up in wonder at how high up she had been. It was a hot, still day. She heard heat bugs and an ambulance. Presently she went over to the swings and took a turn on each one, since there was nobody else in the park.
    She was on the last swing when Helen McCormack came waddling across the lawn, calling that a boy had just been run over by a car. Beth slid off the swing. “He’s almost dead!” Helen called.
    “Who?” Beth asked.
    “I don’t know his name. Nobody did. He’s about eight. He’s got red hair. The car ran over his leg
and
his back.”
    “Where?”
    Helen was panting. “I shouldn’t have walked so fast,” she said, holding her hands on either side of her enormous head. “My cranium veins are throbbing.” Little spikes of her wispy blond