Blessed Art Thou Among Women

Kristen Desmond

Lambs Grove Residential Community Home is a nice place to live, because the hallways don’t smell like pee or vomit, and because the cafeteria staff lets you have as much macaroni and cheese as you want at supper time.

I can do for myself a good bit, which is why I get to live in my own little set of rooms over in Cluster A, which is where you get to live if you can do for yourself. If you can’t do for yourself—if you’re one what hits your head against walls, or if you take to seizing up and swallowing your tongue, or if you’re too thick to know when and where to make water, or if you don’t have enough sense not to jiggle your privates about in public—why then they’ve got no choice but to put you down in the Main Center, in little rooms that open up like a hundred mouths all along the halls. They seem to me an awful shame, those folks that have got to stay down there in the Main Center, what with them talking all garbled and spitting up their food and messing on themselves. Nights, when I’m full of macaroni and cheese from supper in the Main Center cafeteria and I’m making my way back to Cluster A, I pass by their rooms. I can hear them coughing in a watery way, or rolling dryly in their beds, or talking nonsense to themselves. Sometimes I see them staring away at nothing at all, their mouths parted and their arms limp, and as I walk, I thank Jehovah up in Heaven for giving me a simple life.
    When Lorna brought me here a few months ago, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of living in a halfway house. I told this to Doctor Yates, who sees to who is fit to live at Lambs Grove and who is not.
    In his office, Doctor Yates perched himself on the corner of his desk and said, “So, Miss Birch, your sister tells me you’d like to live with us here at Lambs Grove. Is that all right with you?”
    “No,” I said. “It’s not all right.” Then I said, “I’d rather not live in a halfway house. I’m not a retard.”
    Doctor Yates coughed like he’d taken in some air down the wrong pipe. He said, “I prefer the term ‘community home’ to ‘halfway house,’ Miss Birch. If it’s all the same to you.” He looked down at his clipboard for a good piece, and when he looked up again, his face was all tight, like he had pains behind his eyes. “To be truthful, Miss Birch, Lambs Grove is the kind of place you belong—a,” he paused, “community home. According to this application completed by your sister,” he said, turning the clipboard toward me like he was trying to prove that he was not pulling my leg, “according to this here, at age forty-two, you’ve never lived on your own, which would indicate to me that you do not have the necessary capacity to do so. Furthermore, Miss Birch, the results of the IQ tests that I have here in front of me indicate that you’ve earned a score of sixty, which would classify your case as a mild form of mental retardation. While I’m certainly not calling you a ‘retard’ as such, your mental condition does require you to be under some amount of supervised care.” He gave me a hard look, like he’d just laid down the law and felt very keen about it all. “What do you think about that, Miss Birch?” he asked, smiling a little out of one side of his mouth.
    “I prefer the term ‘simple’ to ‘retarded,’ Doctor Yates,” I said. “If it’s all the same to you.”
    On the way home in the car, Lorna asked me what I thought about Lambs Grove and Doctor Yates and the whole bit, and I spoke my mind. “I’m not a retard, Lorna,” I said. Lorna bunched her face up like she does when she’s fixing to cry.
    “Beryl,” she said. She closed her fingers around the steering wheel and did not look at me. “I know you’re no retard. You’re just slow is all. But honey On the road, the traffic light turned red, and Lorna stepped on the brake. She reached over and took my hand from my lap. “Beryl,” she said, “1 can’t take care of you forever. I got my own future to think about. Bud and me want to have children before it’s too late, honey. I’m not getting any younger, you know.” Then she said again, “I can’t take care of you forever.”
    “I could go back to live with Mom and Pop, then,” I said. Before I’d gone to live with Lorna, I lived with my mom and pop in Honey Creek, which is over in Pottawattamie County. I can’t recall how many years it was that I lived there with them, but I know it was a goodly piece of time. They treated me kind, my folks, and it struck me right then that I shouldn’t have ever left Honey Creek for Lorna’s house in Swale Dale in the first place.
    When I told Lorna this, she snatched her hand away from mine like it was something she’d rather not touch. “Mom and Pop are dead, Beryl,” she said. “They’re dead. They’re dead and they’re not coming back, and they can’t take care of you anymore.” Then she added, “And neither can I.”
    To tell Jehovah’s honest truth, I sometimes forget things. I had forgotten about Mom and Pop being dead. I did not tell Lorna this, because it’s shameful to forget important things like that, so Lorna and I were quiet for the rest of the ride home.
    Later that night, in Lorna’s back bedroom, I lay in bed and tried to remember what it was like living with my mom and pop in Honey Creek. I remembered the smell of my mother’s kitchen: the brown smells of applesauce and bread pudding and gravy. She’d stand at the stove, mornings, and I’d sit at the kitchen table and watch her work. She’d turn from her place to move the potato cake skillet from the heat, or to skim the fat from the chicken stock, and when she’d catch me watching her, she’d dab at her eyes and say, “Beryl, shoo.” I remembered she’d fix corn biscuits for my breakfast, and then fix a hot lunch for my pop, which she’d take over to him at his construction site around noon every day. I remembered the sound of my pop coming home from the sites in his heavy work boots, thumping up the front stairs—one, two, three, four, then the sound of him kicking the side of the house, knocking the mud from his soles, first one foot—one, two, three, four—then the other one—one, two, three, four. I remembered him leaning over the little desk in his study, reading Awake! or The Watchtower, or figuring numbers. He’d press the pencil lead hard into the paper, scrawl out some figures, then scratch them Out again. He’d rub his skull, running his fingers through the hair on the sides of his head. He’d look up at me and say, “Beryl, if the world were as simple as you are, sweetheart, it would be a much nicer place to live in.”
    Lying there in Lorna’s back bedroom, thinking of my folks, I began to hear noise coming through the wall behind me. When I held my breath, I could hear that the sound was Lorna sobbing. I listened carefully, pressing my ear up against the cool plaster. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard her saying words like “Beryl,” and “hassle,” and “burden,” and “tiring.” Then Lorna was quiet for a time, and I heard Bud’s voice, and it sounded heavy and strained. I heard him say “moron.” I heard him say “retard.” It got real quiet again, and I supposed I would hear Lorna’s voice all tight and pinched the way it sounds when she’s angry and jumpy and on-the-outs with Bud. Instead, I heard this through the wall: Lorna’s laugh—slow and soft and steady—then Bud’s guffawing chuckle behind it. I lay down on the bed and tried to find sleep, but I could not, on account of the laughing, and so I went to the closet and emptied my clothes and shoes and undergarments into a suitcase. My special things, like the Good Book, and my photo of my mom and pop, and my lucky green rabbit’s foot my pop won for me at the All-Iowa Fair, and a spoon from my mom’s silver chest, and my coffee tin full of nickels I’d been saving for as long as I can remember, I put into this pocketbook I got what’s big enough to hold a good deal. When I looked at my things all packed up like that, they didn’t seem to amount to much, even with the big pocketbook and all, but I thought of Luke’s story about Jesus teaching the people that life isn’t measured by how much they own, and I felt better about it all then.

I’m no retard. I may be simple, but I know when I’m not wanted. When Lorna got up in the morning to let the dogs out to pee, she found me sitting in the backseat of the car, with my suitcase beside me and my pocketbook on my lap. Bud came around behind her and said, “Shoot, Beryl, where you off to this fine morning?” He was still in his undershorts and a tank top that said Dogs ‘N’ Suds across the front.
    I did not answer him, so he said again, “I said, where you off to, Beryl?” He turned to Lorna and shrugged his big shoulders. Then he said, “Going back to Honey Creek to live with Mom and Pop?”
    “Mom and Pop,” I said, “are dead, Bud.” I did not tell him I could not remember Mom and Pop dying: how or when or why. I tried to sound smart and very well-spoken, the way I’d heard ladies on the TV speak, with their lips pressed into thin pink lines. I said, “I should like to go to Lambs Grove please, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
    Bud tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts and said, “Well hell’s bells, Beryl, it ain’t no trouble at all.” He turned and went into the house, and I looked at Lorna, who was clutching her pink bathrobe close to her body like she was very cold. Her eyes were wet, and she looked down at the ground. I thought she might open her mouth to say something just then, but Bud came tearing through the doorway in his dungarees and a satiny ball jacket with the DOGS ‘N’ SUDS shirt still on underneath. He spit into his hands and smoothed them over his hair, then stepped into his gym shoes. When he opened the car door, he turned the key in the engine and said, “Move ‘em out!” Lorna went back into the house and slammed the door behind her.

It turns out that I liked Lambs Grove from the first day I moved into Cluster A. I got a nice little set of rooms all to myself. I got a big bed and a bed cover what’s got roses all over it. I got a little sitting room with a blue sofa and blue chairs and a color TV in it. I got a bathroom covered in smooth white tiles that are cool when I step on them, mornings.
    The nurses here at Lambs Grove like me because I don’t throw tantrums, or swallow household objects, or tear my hair, or yell filth at them. They call me “Miss Beryl,” and they come to my door, mornings, and ask, How are you today, Miss Beryl? Can I get you anything at all, Miss Beryl? Taking breakfast in the Main Center today, Miss Beryl? I try not to let all of the attention go to my head. Just a few weeks ago, when I’d settled into my set of rooms, there came a knock at my door, and when I got up to see who it could be, three of the nurses that work my cluster were there with a fat golden fish in a glass bowl that had tiny stones at the bottom and a bright pink plastic castle and all. Around the rim at the mouth of the bowl, they had tied a red and gold bow. I asked them what it could all be about, and then Candy, the little yellow- haired nurse who was holding the bowl in her hands, said that the nurses had been talking, and they thought I might like a little friend to keep with me, one that I could talk to a bit, nights, one what wouldn’t be a lot of trouble to care for. Then she handed me the bowl, and I set it down on the hail table straight away, since I’m prone to clumsiness and dropping things that oughtn’t be dropped or spilled.
    Then Stella, one of the other nurses, spoke up and said, “We thought you could use a little family, Beryl.” I thought of Lorna and Bud, who I hadn’t seen or heard from since Bud dropped me off in front of Lambs Grove a few weeks earlier. I thought of my mom and pop, sleeping in their graves in Honey Creek.
    “And especially around these holidays, too,” Candy said, wagging her head sorrowfully.
    It was then that I felt the Fingers of Jehovah squeezing me on the shoulder.
    Now, I’m not one what goes about shoving my religion up under other people’s noses, but what with it being the first week of December and all, it began to seem like that little fish was a Christmas present from those nurses to me. I knew what I had to do to stop the squeezing of those mighty Fingers. “I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I said, pushing the fish in its bowl away from me. “I’m sorry,” I said, just like the Elders at the Kingdom Hall taught us to do, “but I can’t accept a Christmas gift, according to Jehovah’s Law.” I pressed my eyelids hard together so as not to look at the fish swimming in its bright, tiny sea.
    I stood there for a while with my eyes closed, listening to the nurses shifting about in their white nurse shoes, whispering a little, and breathing lightly. Then Candy said, “Miss Beryi, we didn’t mean you any disrespect, honest.” I heard a dry crinkling sound, like the unraveling of a coarse thread, and then Candy leaned in real close and told me to open my eyes. When I did, the bowl was still there, with the fish floating delicately inside it, and Candy had the big red and gold bow stuffed into the front pocket of her white nurse’s uniform.
    “Now,” she said, smiling and gesturing toward the glass bowl, “a gift is only a Christmas gift if it’s tied up with red ribbons or wrapping paper. Isn’t that so?”
    I shrugged my shoulders a bit. The only Christmas gifts I ever did see were on the TV and in the movies, but the ones I had seen did have red ribbons and trimmings tied all about them.
    “Without this bow, then,” Candy said, “that’s no Christmas gift.”
    This didn’t seem right, somehow, too slick and quick, but suddenly the squeezing was gone, and so I said, “Simple enough, I guess.”
    Candy pushed the bowl in my direction, then turned to leave. “There isn’t a god up in heaven could argue with that,” she said. Then she shut the door.

Since I can do for myself, I get special privileges, even beyond what I’ve got living over in Cluster A. I get to take the bus into Des Moines three times a week to work as a telephone operator for the Bargain Shopping Club. It’s part of what Doctor Yates calls a “community outreach program,” and it isn’t very hard work, which is why they let me take part. Doctor Yates tells me that the job is supposed to give me a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. I told him I already got all that. I took the job on account of the fact that I get to talk to total strangers on a regular basis. One thing I like about the strangers I talk to on the phone is that they’re just itching to lay down their money for a good bargain. I’ve sold such things as plus-size elastic pants, cordless personal hair removal systems, and miracle thigh creams to folks from all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
    On my first day of work at the Bargain Shopping Club, my supervisor, Miss Senn, gave me a telephone operator’s headset and a little laminated card that reads: It’s a Great Day at the Bargain Shopping Club. This Is (Your Name Here) Speaking. How May I Help You Save Money Today? So when people call, this is what I say, with the exception that I say, “This is Beryl,” instead of, “This is your name here.” What folks seem to love, though, is the part that goes, “How may I help you save money today?” They get all excited. They say, “Beryl, tell me something: is this Soothing Itch Salve as rich and creamy as it looks on TV?” or, “Are the crushed velvet jogging slippers really as plush as they say?” We don’t see too much of the merchandise here at the telephone center, so I can’t vouch for most of it. I just tell folks not to worry, that the Bargain Shopping Club wouldn’t let them down, and that’s Jehovah’s truth, as far as I’m concerned. The other thing I like about the strangers I talk to on the phone is that to them, I’m not just Beryl-the-simple-girl-from-LambsGrove. To them, I’m Beryl-the-bargain-queen. To them, I’m anyone.
    When I’m not answering phone calls at the Bargain Shopping Club, I sit home in my set of rooms in Cluster A and talk to Jonah, which is the name I gave to my little fish, on account of the fact that he’s so very little, and he looks as if he’s been swallowed up by the great glass mouth of his bowl. I tell Jonah most everything, and he’s not a bad listener, either, though I heard it said once that fish haven’t got any ears, so I don’t know. At any rate, some nights I tell Jonah about the merchandise we sell at the Bargain Shopping Club: the flame-resistant car polishes, the electric vegetable dehydrators, the battery-operated stir fry cookers, the clap-on-clap-off appliances. Sometimes I tell him about what I see on my bus ride to and from Des Moines: the slick, wet trickle of the South Skunk River, the flat expanse of farmland through Altoona, the colors and lights of Adventureland Park in Bondurant, just off of I-8o. I tell Jonah all of these things, and he makes like he has things to say back, too, fashioning an 0 with his mouth, as if he’s telling me, “Pop, pop, pop, pop,” without end.
    One afternoon in particular, I was sitting on my couch, minding my own business, reading to Jonah from an article in The Watchtower called, “Does Jehovah Want Me to Wear a Wig?” (turns out that He doesn’t), when one of the nurses came and knocked on my door and said that there was a phone call for me from my sister Lorna, and would I like to come on down to the Main Center to take the call? We don’t get to keep phones in our rooms, not even over here in Cluster A, so I followed her down the stairs and through the corridors to the little booth where you can receive calls if you’re one what can talk clear enough for most people to make sense of what you’re saying.
    On the phone, Lorna sounded breathy and hot, like she’d just run at a good clip for some time. “Beryl, honey,” she said, “I’m sorry I haven’t called or come up, but there’s something big happening, Beryl, something big, and I don’t have anyone to tell but you, and Oh! You’ve got to promise you won’t tell another soul, not yet, not now, at least until things are a little further along because Oh! Beryl, Bud and me . . . well, I’m pregnant is what it is! Can you believe it?” She told me how she and Bud had been “trying,” and how it was that she was “past her prime” and they didn’t know if she’d be able to get pregnant at all, and about how they’d wanted this so badly, and how wonderful it all was. Then Lorna said, “Well for God sakes, Beryl, don’t just stand there all quiet, say something!”
    “Aunt Beryl!” I said.
    “What?” Lorna said.
    “An aunt,” I said, “Aunt Beryl! I’m going to be an aunt, Lorna.”
    “Keep your voice down,” Lorna hissed through the phone. “Someone will hear you. It’s bad luck to tell everyone this early on in the pregnancy. I swear to God, Beryl, you’ll jinx me yet and ruin the entire thing.”
    After that, I didn’t feel like there was much else to say to Lorna right then, what with her getting all ornery and nasty on me, so I congratulated her, asked her when she was due, and congratulated her again. She told me she had a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks—December 22nd, she said—and they’d know the exact due date then. Then I hung up the phone. I had the sudden urge to tell someone Lorna’s news. I thought I should say, “Lorna is pregnant!” or, “Guess who’s going to be an aunt?” I don’t know what trouble     Lorna could find with me telling one of the nurses or any number of the folks that stay here at Lambs Grove. Who worries over what a bunch of simple folks and retards know? But I promised, and a promise is a promise. Anyway, I didn’t want to jinx Lorna. Instead, I bit my lip all of the way back to my rooms in Cluster A, and when I went inside, I made sure that the door was closed behind me. I pressed my cheek up against the cool glass of Jonah’s bowl and said, “Jonah, guess who’s going to be an aunt?” I figured that Lorna couldn’t fault me for telling Jonah. He’s a fish and hasn’t got a soul, anyhow.
    After I’d told Jonah, I felt better, like somebody had hefted a big burlap sack of burdens from off my back. I sat down on my couch and thought of Lorna being pregnant, Lorna heaving over the sink, mornings. Lorna sipping from a glass of ice water instead of a bottle of beer when Bud got home from work, nights. Lorna lying in bed, demanding seasoned curly fries and frosted bear claws. I tried to conjure her up in my mind: Lorna with a big round pregnant belly, standing sideways in front of a full-length mirror. The picture that came to me looked more like Lorna with a big red kickball shoved up under her shirt than a real pregnant woman with a real pregnant belly.
    It was while I was sitting there, fixing my thoughts on Lorna being pregnant, that I felt the first prick of envy growing inside of me. I pressed my hands to my belly, which had grown soft and fat, what with all the macaroni and cheese I’d helped myself to down in the Main Center cafeteria. I pressed my hands down harder in case it kicked, or turned, or moved, so that I would be able to feel it, but there was no kick, no turn, no movement. There was only the pricking that started deep inside of me somewhere and ran right up through my vitals and into my bosom.
    To tell Jehovah’s honest truth, I’ll never get to grow a baby in my womb, and let me tell you why. There was a time, a good long time ago when I was still a girl, right around my sixteenth birthday, that all I wanted was to have me a little baby, one what would love me and I would love it, and all would be right with the world.
    I didn’t know much about it then, and I don’t know much more about it now, but I’ve always known this much about making babies: you need a man to help you make one. I didn’t know many men, on account of not getting to go to the high school like Lorna did, packing a lunch and a book sack and catching the bus, mornings. One day, around noontime, when my mother was about to leave for the construction site with Pop’s lunch pail, Elder Laughner came by to ask if he could take a few moments out of my mother’s afternoon to witness with her, which is what we JWs call it when we pray and study the Scriptures together. My mother said that she supposed he could, so long as I would take my pop’s lunch pail up the road to the construction site he was working on.
    The construction site wasn’t too far up the road from our house—a mess of chopped down trees was what it looked like, really—and when I got there, I saw my pop’s truck, but I didn’t see him anywhere around, so I sat down on one of the big fallen trees to wait for him to come around. I waited for a good while, and by and by a young man in dungaree coveralls came over and introduced himself to me as Hylan Scoggins. He held a hammer in one hand, and he had a heap of roofing nails pinched between his lips. He spit the nails into his hand and shoved them in his front pocket and said, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing Out here in this pretty big mess of a place?”
    I told him I was waiting for my pop. “This is his lunch pail,” I told him. “I’m bringing it to him.”
    Then he asked me how come it was that I was there delivering lunch to my pop instead of studying on lessons in school, and I told him what was what.
    “I’m simple,” I said. “School won’t have me.”
    Hylan swung his head around a bit from side to side like he was checking the place out, and I thought maybe he was looking for my pop, until he said, “Tell me, what’s your name, sweetheart?”
    “It’s Beryl Birch,” I said. “Rudy Birch is my pop.”
    “Yeah,” Hylan said. “Right.” He kept looking all around him, like a boy being trailed by a pack of dogs, or a man wanted by the arm of the law. “What I was wanting to know was if you’ve ever been with a man before, Beryl Birch.”
    I wasn’t too sure what it was he was getting at, so I said, “How do you mean?”
    He told me I knew how he meant, and I began to feel very dull and ignorant and thickheaded, and so I said, “Well of course I have.”
    Hylan smiled, and the next thing I knew, his hand was on my bosom, and the next thing I knew after that he had pushed me down onto the ground and he was pressing himself down on top of me, and my skirt was up around my waist, and I thought I felt his finger brush up against my private place, and then I saw his hands on my wrists and realized that that hadn’t been his finger at all, and suddenly I knew what was happening. I may be simple, but there are some things that just come natural, even to simple folk. I closed my eyes right then and there and asked Jehovah to put a little baby inside of me.
    I can’t recall too much about the way it went after that, but I can tell you how it ended, for sure. Hylan hovered over me, moving himself around like he’d taken to seizing up, and then there was a sudden gush of wetness, like the bursting of a pipe, and when I opened my eyes and looked up, I saw my pop standing over us. He’d gone white, like one with a vicious fever, and he reached down and grabbed Hylan by the back of his coveralls, spun him around, and began to choke him, his big hands wrapping themselves like snakes or vines around Hylan’s neck. I remember Hylan breaking free of my pop’s grip somehow, running headlong into the brush at the edge of the clearing, zipping up his fly as he went, and I remember wanting to shout out, “Thank you for helping me to make a baby, Hylan,” but then my pop turned to me and his face was still as white as I’d ever seen it, and I knew that it’d be better if I kept quiet. He said, “You okay?”
    I said, “I brought you your lunch, Pop.”
    “Get in the truck, Beryl,” my pop said, motioning with his head toward the old truck. When I got up and began to walk away, straightening my skirt and brushing the dust from my hair, I thought I heard him say, “Goddamned retard,” but I probably heard him wrong. My pop would never take the Lord Jehovah’s name in vain.

I expect that Jehovah answered that prayer that I prayed there on the ground of the construction site with Hylan pressing himself into me, but I’ll never know, since that next day my mom told me that I was awful sick and had to go to the doctor to get well. I remember the way she said it, and it was like this: “We’ve got to take you to the doctor to get this fixed.” At any rate, I can tell you this much: I walked into the doctor’s office on my own two legs, and when it was time for me to come out again, my pop had to carry me. When I asked my mother what it was that the doctors had done to fix me, she just said, “They fixed you up good.” When I asked her why, if I had been fixed, I was sore and bleeding and had to be carried out by my pop, she said, “Beryl, stop asking questions you don’t want to know the answers to.” Ever since that day I haven’t had my womanly troubles each and every month, which I suspect is something of a blessing and a curse together in the same bag. Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep nights, I think about those doctors that fixed me up. I think of them cutting me open and looking into my womb and seeing a little baby, maybe. I think they must have seen that and thought it was so beautiful that they wanted it for themselves. I think they just took that baby and my womb with it, too, because maybe they couldn’t have a baby for their own and were jealous of me and mine. I don’t know what it is they did to fix me up, but I know this: if my baby and my womb were cut from my belly on account of a bunch of doctors feeling jealous of a knocked up simple girl from Honey Creek, Iowa, it seems to me an awful shame on every side.

I can’t say that I blame those doctors for being jealous. I’m jealous too. I think about Lorna and her baby nearly all of the time. I wonder how it feels to be growing something inside of you like that. On my bus rides into Des Moines, I pretend that I’m the pregnant one. I take my time climbing the steps into the bus. I hold my stomach with both hands as I walk down the aisle. I back myself into my seat, put one hand on my back, lower myself into the seat slowly like I’ve seen pregnant ladies do from time to time. The folks on the bus don’t seem to notice. They stare out their windows, or work on pieces of cross-stitch, or study the want ads in the Des Moines Register. Something in me wants them to notice, though. Something in me wants them to ask me when I’m due, ask me if it’s a boy or if it’s a girl, ask me if I’ve had the morning sickness real bad or not. Something in me wants them to ask me these things, and I know that something is envy, but I pretend it’s a baby all the same, a little baby what wants to be asked about and doted on and fussed over by folks riding from someplace to someplace else on the westbound bus across Iowa.

For the last month or so at the Bargain Shopping Club, we’ve been selling Christmas decorations and fake pine wreaths and all manner of tree trimmings to folks when they call in to reguest them. Since I’m not one what goes around shoving my religion up under other people’s noses, I keep my mouth shut about t. I haven’t once felt the squeeze of Jehovah’s Fingers on my shoulder since the day I took my first call for the Christmas items. When it comes right down to it, it doesn’t bother me very much at all, and anyway, the folks who call in to order those Christmas items are so agreeable and pleasant on the phone that I can’t bring myself to tell them about how it is that Jehovah forbids the wanton celebration of pagan holidays like Christmas and Easter and Halloween and birthdays and the like.
    The phone lines at the Club have been real busy on account of what my supervisor Miss Senn calls “the Christmas rush” and all. People leave their shopping and their decorating “until the absolute last minute,” she says, and that’s how come we’ve been getting almost double the amount of calls these past few weeks. I don’t mind the extra work and longer hours too much. There isn’t a whole lot for me back in my little set of rooms in Cluster A now. It turns out that you’ve got to feed a little fish like Jonah nearly every day, which is something that those nurses should have told me from the start. One night I left for dinner in the Main Center cafeteria, and when I came back upstairs, I found Jonah floating at the top of the water in his bowl, motionless and limp. It seemed to me an awful shame, such a nice little fish, dead so sudden, and when I asked the nurse on duty what to do about burying Jonah’s body, she told me, “Flush it,” which is what I did. Anyway, it seems that the nurses had given little fishes to all of us in Cluster A, and here I’d thought it was a secret that we kept between us, special. I know this because on the way back to my set of rooms, I heard that nurse say to another one, “That’s the fifth one they’ve flushed this week. Next year we ought to get them all something they can’t bruise, maim, or kill.” The other nurse said, “Like a pet rock,” and then I heard them laughing. I’m not a retard. If they’d told me that I had to feed that little fish, I’d have done it, and things wouldn’t have come to such a sorrowful end. It’s lonely there in those rooms without Jonah, and so I’ve been spending five days a week here at the Club’s telephone center instead of only three, just until the Christmas season is over and things get back to normal.
    This past week, my supervisor Miss Senn brought in one of the life-sized manger scenes that the Club is selling, and she set it up right there between the little sectioned-off operator cubicles in the telephone center. I have to admit that it’s a beautiful manger scene, just like a postcard out of the Gospel of Luke. It’s got the oriental kings in all of their finery, and it’s got Mary in her blue shift gown, and it’s got Joseph with his crooked shepherd’s staff and all. What I like best about it, though, is the little baby Jesus, fresh to the world, lying in in His manger of straw. When the other telephone operators are busy taking orders, and I’m on break and making my way to the bathroom or the drinking fountain, I pass by the scene and take a good long look at that sweet little baby lying in the straw. Mary is there, looking down on Him like He’s just about the best thing she’s ever seen in her whole life. Sometimes, when no one is looking, I lean in real close, and I tell her, “Blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” Mary doesn’t say a thing back, and though I know it’s because she’s made of plastic, I like to imagine that the real reason she does not speak is because she’s treasuring my words, pondering them in her heart.

Late last night, when the bus dropped me off and I climbed the stairs that lead up to my little set of rooms in Cluster A, there was a message tacked to my door that said Lorna had called and that I was to find the nurse on duty to help me put in a return call that night. When I did, the nurse led me down to the phone in the Main Center and dialed the number for me. She handed me the phone, it rang a few times, and then Lorna’s voice came on and she said, “Hello?”
    “Lorna,” I said, “this is your sister Beryl.”
    It was quiet for a moment, and then Lorna said, “It’s dead, Beryl.”
    That was all she needed to say. I may be simple, but I’m no retard, and I knew that what she meant to say was that the baby she’d had growing inside of her had died. I heard a soft weeping sound in the distance, and it was not the sound of Lorna crying, and when I listened harder, I could hear Bud blowing his nose into his old hanky and whimpering like a lost dog.
    I knew that I hadn’t jinxed Lorna, what with telling Jonah about the pregnancy and all, but something inside me could not help but wonder whether I should have kept my big mouth shut.
    I didn’t know what to say to Lorna then. She was crying and talking at the same time, and I had to struggle to make sense of her words. She said that she’d been to the doctor that day, and that he hadn’t been able to find the baby’s heartbeat, at all, and when they looked into her womb with some special instrument, the doctor saw this: a tiny, perfectly formed baby with fingers and toes and all floating in a hollow womb what had kept on expanding long after the baby had been lost. She said the doctor thought the baby had been dead for about two weeks, and that this wasn’t peculiar to see in women her age. “Oh my God, Beryl,” Lorna said. “I’ve been carrying a dead baby around inside of me for two weeks.”
    It came to me to say that Jehovah must not have knitted that baby together in Lorna’s womb quite the way He was supposed to, as it says in the Scriptures, but instead I said, “Jehovah is with you, Lorna,” because I thought that might be a better comfort to her.
    She said, “Beryl, tell me this: where was He when I needed Him?” Then she hung up the phone.

To tell Jehovah’s honest truth, I didn’t know the answer to that question. It bothered me for a good piece of the rest of that night, and when I could not find sleep, I thought about Jonah floating lifelessly in that bowl that was always too big for him, and then I could not help but think of Lorna’s baby floating in a womb that had kept on growing without any baby to give form or nourishment to. I got up and went to the Scriptures then, to find an answer that would let me find sleep. I read from Luke: “In the temple, Simeon blessed Mary, and said unto her, ‘The child you have borne is chosen by God. Sorrow, like a sharp sword will break your own heart and cleave it into two.’”

Today was my last day at the Bargain Shopping Club. The telephone center closes down from December twenty-fourth until the first of the year, on account of the fact that folks want time to be with their families, and anyway, the television station that airs the Bargain Shopping Club’s display show plays all the Christmas movies it can get a hold of during that time, so the Club’s out of luck until January second rolls around. So long as the Club wants to keep me, and Doctor Yates sees fit to approve me, I expect I’ll be back here at the Club’s telephone center in January. 1 like the job. It makes me feel wanted, like I make a difference, like I’m somebody to all of those strangers with television sets and telephones and credit cards out there. 
    Since today was the last day before the telephone center shuts down, the other operators threw a big Christmas potluck, with sugared cookies, and coconut cakes, and pecan pies, and apple turnovers, and all. In the break room there was singing and laughter, and the sound of food being chewed. I expect I could’ve taken part in that Christmas party—I haven’t felt the squeezing Fingers on my shoulder for some time now—but it didn’t seem right to me, all the same.
    The manger scene stood alone in the middle of the telephone center. No one else was around, and I went over and knelt before it and looked up at Mary, whose face was fixed in that adoring gaze of hers. She did not look like one who had felt the sword of sorrow break her heart, as Simeon had said it would. I told her, “Blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ.” She did not answer me back or look up to notice me there, but stared down at the little baby. I looked down on Him too, perfect and pure. I reached Out and picked Him up and held Him in my arms. He was the weight and the size of any healthy baby boy. He fit well in my arms as I cradled him there. He fit well between my bosoms, His head resting on my shoulder. He lit well under my sweater, under my coat, His feet tucked into the waistband of my pants as I left the building with Him next to my belly and made my way to the bus stop. As I got on the eastbound bus, I wondered if Mary’s lips had pulled themselves into a frown, or if, instead, she was still standing there, smiling down on the empty straw manger, feeling the sting of Simeon’s sword of sorrow cleave her heart into two. I took my time climbing the steps into the bus. I held my stomach with both hands as I walked down the aisle. I backed myself into my seat, put one hand on my back, and lowered myself into the seat slowly like I’ve seen pregnant ladies do from time to time.
    When I got back to Lambs Grove, Doctor Yates was waiting for me outside the door to my little set of rooms in Cluster A. He said, “Beryl, it seems to me that we have a problem.”
    It turns out that my supervisor Miss Senn had missed the baby Jesus from His place in her life-sized manger scene and had called Doctor Yates at Lambs Grove to ask him to check things out with me. “Beryl,” he said. “Did you steal the baby Jesus?”
    I didn’t say anything then, because what was there to say to that?
    Doctor Yates said, “Beryl, is the baby Jesus in your pocketbook?”
    “No,” I said. “No sir. That’s the honest truth.” I opened my pocketbook and held it out for him to see. He stood on his tip toes and sneaked a quick look inside, then pulled his head back quickly, like he expected a snake to jump out and bite him on the nose.
    He said, “What all have you got in that big sack, anyway, Beryl?” I took out the Good Book, and the photo of my mom and pop, and the spoon, and the rabbit’s foot, and the tin of nickels, and put them on the floor by his feet.
    “Just my things,” I said.
    Doctor Yates studied on that for a while, and then he cleared his throat and looked me up and down. “Beryl,” he said. “Have you put on some weight?”
    I said, “I eat a lot of macaroni and cheese down in the Main Center cafeteria and all.” I patted my belly lightly, like a full person after a big meal. “They let us eat as much as we want of it at supper time.”
    He said, “I’ll have to look into that.” Then he turned and left me alone outside of my little set of rooms, with my things spread around me on the floor and the baby Jesus tucked into the waistband of my pants.
    I gathered the Book and the photo and the rabbit’s foot and the spoon and the tin of nickels and brought them inside, and when I was certain the door was closed behind me, I brought the baby Jesus out from His hiding place beneath my clothes, and I held Him in my arms, cradling Him there as he seemed to sleep. I brushed my fingers against His smooth pink cheek and kissed His cool plastic forehead, and though I knew He would not suckle, I brought His little lips within reach of my bosom, just in case.
    Nothing else seemed to matter then: not Moses’ law in Exodus what tells us that Jehovah hates a thief, not Solomon’s warning that a lying mouth destroys the soul, not even the threat of the squeezing of the mighty Fingers of Jehovah, which I haven’t felt for quite some time, and I don’t expect to feel directly anymore.
    I remember reading in The Revelation to John that in The End Times, even after they had been exposed to plagues and fire and smoke and sulfur, there were people what refused to repent for their evil thoughts, or their fornication, or their lies, or their thievery. I think they must have thought it had all been worthwhile, the things they had done against their God. I am simple and can’t be trusted to know what’s what, I suppose. But I can tell you this much: those people weren’t sorry for what they had done, and I can’t say that I blame them.
    I’m not sorry either. I look at the baby Jesus sleeping in my arms, and I can’t help feeling like the luckiest girl in the world, what with the way He lies there, smiling up at me like I’m His savior. I rock Him back and forth in my arms, back and forth, and as I rock, I close my eyes and tell myself, “Blessed art thou, Beryl. Blessed art thou among women.”

Kristen Desmond is in her second year at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is currently working on her thesis, a collection of short stories.

“Blessed Art Thou Among Women” appears in our Autumn 1999 issue.