The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online

her nose when she’d been blowing it. She crammed the tissue in her coat pocket. At the same moment, Doris’s little girl emerged from the crowd.
    â€œMommy, can I go up to the top floor of the hotel and look out the window?’
    â€œWe have to go talk to Daddy. He’s the one to ask about that.”
    â€œBut Daddy’s busy talking to Mrs. Pettigrew. He said …”
    Doris’s husband was indeed talking to Mrs. Pettigrew, bending over the velvet hairband while Mrs. Pettigrew laughed into his eyes. Doris Keys took her daughter’s hand and excused herself somewhat abruptly, leaving Marianne with Stephanie Munden in her sea-green dress.
    â€œTurn it over,” Stephanie said. “Read the back.”
    On the back of her card Stephanie had written in flowing capitals with a fine-tip purple pen,
    Â 
    Marianne:
    FOR GOD HAS NOT GIVEN ME
    THE SPIRIT OF FEAR, BUT OF
    LOVE AND OF POWER AND OF
    A SOUND MIND.
    1 Timothy
    Â 
    â€œThe verse is no longer of much use to me,” Stephanie Munden said, then leaned closer and whispered—“But it’s my own fault. I can’t do without sex . I’ve tried and I just can’t, I’m too weak. But you—take that verse to heart, I promise it’ll work. The Lord is real, and all-powerful, and He’ll meet you where you have your greatest need. He tried to meet me, He really did, but I couldn’t make the sacrifice. I’m weak, and I just love sex way too much …”
    Marianne remembered hearing somewhere, maybe in the Anglican crypt, something about the word of god falling onto different kinds of ground, some fertile, others not. How much, she wondered, did Stephanie Munden love sex? Was she a woman whose appetite led her to pursue men on the street and arrange to have sex with them; strange men whom Stephanie did not even know—young, suit-clad workers at the new Toronto Dominion building, innocently carrying vinegar-stained packets along Water Street from the chip wagon on their lunch breaks, until … No, Stephanie had not meant that. Marianne remembered that these people, the Pentecostals, in fact did not or were not supposed to have sex unless they were married. Stephanie was, Marianne realized, a single woman, hardly older than herself … a normal woman, but one who believed she was somehow wrong to crave nakedness, body heat, or the salt lick of a lover’s translucent skin, filled with stars.
    Â 
    Two nights later Marianne went to see a movie with Lloyd. There was no toilet paper in the cubicle at the cinema washroom. She took a tissue out of her pocket. She uncrumpled it and saw that the red stain was Doris Keys’ lipstick. It was a perfect outline of Doris’s open mouth, and it showed all the fullness and membranes of her lips like the segment of a juicy orange. It spoke to Marianne.
    â€œPentecostal women are very careful about keeping their husbands,” it said. And then Marianne flushed it down the toilet, and went back to watch the movie with Lloyd. When it was over he asked if she wanted to drive outside town to see Halley’s Comet.
    â€œIt’s a clear night and you were saying you’d like to see it.”
    He drove her down the Southern shore in his cream-coloured Volkswagen and parked at the top of Tors Cove where an old lane with a wooden fence led over a hill and down to Hare’s Ears beach. The comet was a blur, hardly illumined, a stain of milk spilled on a black coat and only half sunk in. The fact that it was a blur reminded her it was moving fast, though it appeared as at a standstill. She kept her eyes raised to it as they walked, linking her arm in Lloyd’s and relying on him for direction, leaning on him; she did not need to look down at the lane. By the time they got down to the pebbles and the edge of the water, the hill’s spruce silhouettes had angled to obscure the comet.
    â€œThat walk,” she said, “was a