“You’re going to try again?” I asked Jenny as we went downstairs together.
“Yeah.” She had on her pajama bottoms this time.
“Hey Mom, Hey Dad,” I said. “What can I do?”
“Could you do the eggs?” Mom asked, grinning at Jenny, and winking at me.
“Sure,” I said, casting her a questioning glance, to which she surreptitiously hitched her shoulder toward Caleb’s house.
We were actually sitting down when the sliding glass door opened, and Caleb walked in, in a different pair of boxers this time. “Am I too late?” Caleb asked. Jenny had her back to him and was just putting some eggs on her plate, and she almost dropped them on the floor when she heard his voice. She looked at me with her eyes wide.
“If you could turn around for a second, Caleb,” I said, “I think Jenny has bitten off a bit more than she can chew.”
“Sure,” he said, and she dashed off upstairs.
“One of these days I am going to succeed,” she said, minutes later, coming back fully pajamad, and blushing lightly.
“No problem,” Caleb said, “I understand. I remember when I first tried to wear briefs. It took me three weeks to be able to go to the bathroom without covering up… even when it was the middle of the night. And I think it took me another month to come down to breakfast that way. But one day you will see me as your brother and you won’t care anymore.”
“Well, it’s not like you haven’t seen everything anyway,” she said, “We did grow up together.”
“Looking forward to church?” Caleb asked me.
“Oh, my, I hadn’t even thought about it, outside of my clothes. How am I going to handle church?”
“What do you mean?” Mother asked, but Father and Caleb both looked concerned.
“Well, so far I haven’t had to act in front of people I really know. I assume that Roberta has girlfriends at church?”
“Of course,” Jenny said, and we all grew very silent.
“Well, you can come to church with my family if you want,” Caleb said. “I think you know fewer people there, and since you would be with me, well, you would seem different anyway.”
“Oh, Caleb that is a wonderful….” I started, but Father said,
“Of course. What an idiot I am. Of course she should go to church with you. You are my first, Bobbi, and I am still working this through. Of course you should go to church with your husband, and you should start now.”
Everyone looked at him. “Well, shouldn’t she? She is part of his family now, not ours.”
True, we hadn’t discussed this, but it fit with everything else we had discussed.
“I need to go shower now, then,” I said. “Caleb’s church is a lot earlier.You want to come watch?”
“No, thank you,” he said, “it is a wonderful offer, but perhaps more than I can bear. I will run back to my house to tell my folks,dress, and then come help with the dishes.”
Mother and Jenny were waiting in my room when I got back from the shower, and I felt like some dummy in a shop with them all poking and pulling at me. “I brought some perfume,” Mother said.
“No thank you, Mother,” I said and, besides a quiet sigh, she didn’t say anything. “Well, you’re ready then. Have fun darling,” she said, kissing me.
“I will settle for not being totally embarrassed,” I said
“You, you can’t go to church with a backpack,” Jenny said, “you really can’t. So I got this purse.” she said, lifting it off the bed where she had put it when she came in. I“t is the least purse-like purse I could find… honestly. And I put some pads in it, just in case you start really early.”
I looked at it. It really didn’t look that much like a purse, almost more like a case for binoculars, and I suppose I had to carry my wallet somehow. “Thanks Jens, Mom. You’ve been great.” I said, kissing them.
“A purse, Bobbi?” Caleb asked me, meeting me on the way to the car, “I thought that was one of you new rules.”
“Well, do you have another suggestion? At school and around town I can have a backpack. But church…”
“Hmmm. True.” He said, nodding his head.
“Bobbi!” Mrs. Jones said, “We are so glad that you are coming with us today.”
“Today and every Sunday, Mom,” I said, “or wherever Caleb takes me.”
“Well, that’s nice,” she said, looking confused. “But I thought you were at school?”
“Yes, well, it is not that long a trip back for church,” I said, looking at Caleb, who nodded.
“Oh, well, that is great,” she said, still sounding confused, but contented.
“Bobbi!” A girl said, coming up and greeting me on the church steps. My brain panicked for a second, but I knew her. Jill, I think her name was. She was in several of my highschool classes. She did a double take, saw the way I was holding Caleb, looked at my hand, “Bobbi?! Congratulations!! Girls, look, come look at the ring!”
It wasn’t really that hard being the center of attention like this. Everyone was so focused on the ring, and the engagement, and the (edited) details of how it happened to care too much about how I was acting or what I knew. And it was over mercifully quickly.
“We need to get inside, girls,” Caleb said, taking my arm and rescuing me from the group, “you all can talk later.”
As we sat down I realized that not everything about getting married was going to be a bed of roses. I had always loved our church, with it’s high vaulted ceiling, and our wonderful choirs. It was a small town, but we even had a boys choir. Not many boys nowadays were willing to participate in a choir, but our choir director was so good that he had non-believers lining up to join.
Caleb’s church was rather drab by comparison. The preaching was better, but everything else was drab. No one dressed at all well… jeans and T-shirts… well, not T-shirts but casual button-downs. I wasn’t the only girl in a skirt… but I was almost the only girl under fifty, and definitely the best dressed. Well, I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to dress down for the church, and I knew Caleb wouldn’t want me to.
We stood up and sang several hymns. I stayed with the soprano part, except for one song, where the alto keyed off the soprano and had an evident line. I felt Caleb twitch a bit when I departed, and I saw him smile, which motivated me. But none of the other songs were helpful, and I stayed with the Soprano. He had a beautiful tenor, and was about the loudest singer in the church except for the song leader; whose virtues were that he could sing on key, could sing loudly, and was enthusiastic.
“Today’s text,” the preacher said, “Todays text will be the second chapter of Daniel, and the title is, ‘Wisdom comes from God alone.’”
As I listened to the preacher expound on the life of Daniel, so much of it seemed to apply to me. Daniel, too, had been put in an impossible position… his parents killed, captured, emasculated, and forced into the court of a foreign king. But he had relied on God to carry him through the difficult time; and God had performed well beyond that, raising him to an important position.
But, as the preacher said, Daniel himself had to behave in obedience. He went through some historical research he had done on just some of the education that Daniel might have been put through, all the things he had to learn. He made my petulance seem rather trivial. All I had to do was learn to live like a girl amongst some other girls.
“Well, Miss Smith, I hear that I get to congratulate you,” the preacher said when we reached the back of the sanctuary and it was my turn to shake his hand. As I showed him my ring I said,
“Thank you so much for your sermon. It was so helpful to me.”
“Well, thank you. But if there was anything helpful, it came from God and not me.”
“I have to go,” I said to Caleb, and went off toward the ladies room, standing in line. Why is it that they always made men’s room and ladies room the same size? Girls have to go twice as often, and take twice as long… our bathrooms should be at least four times as big. Not counting, I thought to myself when I finally got inside, all of the room needed for fixing makeup. I waited on a stall and watched five women try to crowd around one sink, doing something with their faces.
“Shall we get to Sunday School?” Caleb asked.
“Sure, which class are we going to?”
“Well, I talked to the pastor, and he said we should start attending the young couples class.”
I looked at him. He was grinning furiously. My heart beat furiously. That was a much more serious class than the ‘young adults’ class. One of the elders taught it, and it was very serious. But, Caleb looked happy, so I just took his arm and went off to the class.
We found the room and it turned out it wasn’t a big room, and there were only three other couples there. “Caleb, Bobbi,” the elder said, rising from next to his wife when I came in, followed a bit sheepishly by the other two men, “Good of you to join us. Our church really needs more young couples. Most of our young people, if they get married at all, tend to do it later. I hope that we can count on some new children for the nursery soon.”
“I hope so, too,” Mr. Gregson,“ Caleb said. ”This will probably be Bobbi’s last semester at the university, and then we will start being fruitful and multiplying.“
One of the girls looked confused, so the elder said, “The Smiths, Bobbi’s parents, along with some others in town, only believe in what you might call common law marriage. So when Caleb is ready, the two will just move in together. I do hope we will get to have a bit of a big reception tho.”
“Oh, so… are they married?”
The elder laughed, “Words can be tricky, but I would say, and the pastor would say, yes. Just like Mary and Joseph, you know. They were called husband and wife before they came together. We had better get going.”
As he spoke I thought over what Caleb had said. It didn’t really surprise me. I knew he hadn’t thought I should go to college, and at one point almost gotten into an argument with Father about it. Father had taken him into his office and it had been a shaken Caleb that had emerged and gone home.
Suddenly I was aware that Caleb was reading, and I quickly came back to reality and looked at the Bible. Titus 2. Well, it would be. Caleb’s church was of the more fundamentalist type, and they placed a strong emphasis, I was sure, on the whole ‘submit and obey’ stuff.
And, I suddenly realized, I had agreed to marry Caleb knowing that. I had agreed… to submit and obey. Here I had a hard time with some of what Dad wanted me to do, and I was suddenly going to have to obey some young pup who didn’t know half of what he did? We should have talked about this before I said yes. But… but it was too late now. I had said yes. My die was cast. I knew myself too well to think that I could back out of something that I had agreed to.
What if he wanted me to wear a bra, or use makeup? Well, not makeup. I knew he hated makeup, he had told me so several times when we were up in the fort talking about girls. And I was wearing a bra now, sort of. I would adjust if I had to. And he loved me, so he would realize how much I hated those things.
“I have to go again,” I said, and Caleb laughed, then got serious, leaning over to whisper in my ear, “did you start your period?”
“No, not yet, thank goodness, I just have to pee.”
“Oh, Bobbi,” said the young girl from our class, taking my arm, “I will go with you.”
As soon as we were out of earshot from Caleb she said, “How could you do it? Aren’t you scared? I thought I was young at twenty two, you are what, nineteen?”
“Eighteen, actually, I have my birthday next month.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“I guess I am, but, I really want to do it.”
She laughed, “So does he! You have that poor boy just melting for you. The way you ignored him in class, pretending to concentrate on what the elder was saying, just about killed him. And then, at the end, when you just oh-so-naturally took his arm… I wish I had a video to show you, he just lit up! However do you do it?”
I blushed, “Actually, that was just an accident. I was busy thinking about, you know, all that has happened, and suddenly just woke up to realize that the class was over.”
“Well,” she said, going over to the sink, “you need to keep on with the accidents. It was priceless. I wish I could keep my George’s attention that well.”
I came over to the sink to wash my hands. “You need anything?” she asked, pointing to the various things she had laid out to ‘touch up’.
“No thanks,” I said, and she suddenly said, “Why, you don’t have *anything* on!”
For just a second I was startled, looking down to see if I had suddenly turned naked, but I realized that she meant ‘on’ my face. “No.”
“But, why?”
“Why not? Saves me a ton of time, and Caleb likes me better without it. (I would have to tell Caleb about this, so he could back me up.)”
“Well, you do have very nice skin, but still…” she turned back to the sink, shaking her head, “I wouldn’t dare to set foot out of the house without makeup. I guess you need to do the whole , ‘submit and obey’ thing. I am just glad that my George never got such a foolish notion in his head.”
I didn’t know what to think about this, so I walked out… into a crisis. Caleb was standing near the door, and he took my arm, tightly. Down the hall I could see the entryway and the front steps, and a screaming girl was being held by the pastor and his wife, “But why?” She screamed, “What has he done? Where are you taking him?”
“We need to go,” Caleb whispered to me and, ashen faced, I followed him out the back.