Remembering her days as a young woman when she and Amanda could wiggle into tight blue jeans and bend over in front of the pimply-faced novices walking by her on their way to prayer, she cringed and then laughed despite herself. Were their old priests out there that remembered her and her antics? Or perhaps with all the scandal in the church, she was only turning the stomachs of staunch homosexuals; that’s what Amandas things.
She, like so many growing up in the 80s, her parents stashing away for retirement, lost her virginity on prom night, officially left the Church her freshman year and pursued her own wants. Her first confession after 35 years of doing what she wanted seemed daunting; she kept to the basics.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” She thought of the youthful man in a black suit and white collar sitting there, his iPhone just recently put down as she walked into the confessional. Her confession was one-word knells of a bell: “Pride, Envy, Lust,” from the seven deadly sins portion of the sinners’ pile of deviance. She then dove into the portion of the 10 commandments “I’ve not kept the first commandment of having no other God before the Lord my God.” Intoning those words in that little closet with the Millennial priest on the other side reduced her to tears. She had not kept the first commandment; she had never done so. Her God had been herself.
The priest, of course, gave her a penance to perform and then absolution. She felt certain he returned to his phone, and she did not care; she walked out with a storied view on life; existence had a beginning, middle and end – everyone was heading toward the end. Everyone.
“What are you reading? Don’t say any book of the Bible.” Amanda, her best friend from grade school and fellow scoffer, asked as she plunked down into the wide and roomy leather booth of their favorite restaurant. Amanda’s wine glass sloshed dangerously about the crystal rim of her long-stemmed goblet. Her friend kept her strict adherence to the atheistic-borderline-agnostic-church-for-her-mother’s-sake, so took every opportunity to harass her friend on her ‘weakness, ’ i.e. the return to the Church.
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
“Ah, the story of a frustrated love of a young man who knows a weak-minded gigolo when he sees one but can’t tell when he’s been drugged by opium.”
“The very same. But how do you expect the young man to know he was drugged when he never knowingly used opium?”
“Dickens never finished that one, you know.” Ignoring her friend. “I think he died on purpose. ‘Take me now oh Lord because this unfinished tome will drive them all mad’.” She mimicked in a poor rendition of the Queen’s English through her nose and in a deep, gravely masculine voice.
Amanda got her Ph.D. and taught in the local community college. She taught students who were more interested in engineering and computers than anything smelling of the humanities. Going to school with no direction in her mind, but with a vague idea that she loved to read, she persevered to her doctorate. To her credit, she excelled in learning literature with the modern minds’ interpretation and came out of her cap and gown with the idea that she’d convey to her desperate students all writers were frustrated because of an over churched society. Epic poetry and the novel wasn’t a story but a cry for justice.
“You know,” said Amanda in a gossipy voice, “since your reaffirmation into the slave-maker otherwise known as the Church, Flannery O’Conner is making headway into the accolades of those prominent priests and laypeople who, like you, count beads and repeat small bits of poetry.”
Amanda was on her third glass of wine and her friend felt a bit of a betrayer as she was only on her first. Because of the crowded restaurant they had to wait for their usual small booth for an hour; regrettably, their wait included an amiable bartender.
“I don’t like Flannery O’Conner, so I don’t think I’ll join that stamped.”
“For shame!” said Amanda a bit too loud. A few people looked in their direction and her friend smiled at them. “For shame!” she said again in a feigned whisper and a giggle. “There you sit touting Dickens like a long-nosed Protestant. I must go into confession with you.”
“Over Flannery O’Conner?”
“Yes,” said Amanda, suddenly flat and surprisingly sober. “Over Flannery O’Conner. Actually, I should go to confession with you and let the whole damned bunch of them know that their interpretation of her work, their twisting and turning of the woman is disgraceful! Ignore her for decades, breeze past the fact that her life was nothing but southern good manners and her work nothing more than a rewriting of the Gospels! It’s disgraceful.”
“Is that how they interpret her work?” She had always looked at Flannery O’Conner’s characters as beetles in the corner eating the ants and nothing like a story in the dreary pages that followed.
“Oh dear, you do dislike Flanner O’Conner. What happens when you two meet?” Amanda looked steadily at her longtime friend, smiling in a certain smug manner.
“I’m hungry Amanda, starving so I think I’ll leave you here to call your cab and perhaps pick up someone at the bar. I’ll go to the late-night diner for takeout so I can finish a story that will regrettably never be finished, count my beads and thank my God I can’t be brainwashed into believing Flannery O’Connor is anyone’s philosophical property.”
“Oh dear, we are a little put out. You’ll get bored with being pious my dear and join me in picking up any clean looking lover at the bar one of these ole days. Let’s face it, you’re too old to have ten kids in the good Catholic fashion. Besides, you don’t have the patience for it. You should have gone into teaching with me. I can tell you it’s better to threaten them into compliance with a GPA averages. They’re so easily driven, my dear. You’ll see.”