Now a very modern painting by an artist named Kalla Havila hung in the hall where a Titian Madonna once had, and right inside the front door there was a sign on a tripod that read: Bonaventura Camp. A Retreat for Gay Women. There was a sign like that down by the gate, too, in full sight of the road. Zhondra was convinced that you had to approach all this very directly. She had to be on the offensive. You couldn’t let your guard down no matter what. This was the Bible Belt, after all. It might be a little better than Alabama or Mississippi, but Zhondra didn’t think it was better by much. Every time she turned on her radio, the air was full of preachers. Every time she went to town, she had to pass a dozen of those big new concrete Evangelical churches. Town had the Episcopalians and the Baptists and the Methodists, and the United Church of Christ. If there had ever been a synagogue in Bellerton, North Carolina, it must have been burned to the ground in a pogrom.
Zhondra opened one of the big metal front doors. Uncle Samuel liked to do everything he could in etched and molded brass. She stepped onto the broad platform at the top of the steep rose-marble front steps and looked around. Alice was coming out of the trees on the left, her short-cropped bright orange hair looking painted onto her skull. Ginny Marsh was trudging onto the drive through the front gate, baby Tiffany strapped to her like a cartoon papoose. Bobby Marsh really ought to get his act together and let that woman have a car, Zhondra thought. The thought left her immediately, because Bobby Marsh would never get his act together. Bobby Marsh was the walking definition of someone whose act was not together.
Alice reached the front steps and shook her head a little, to get some of the water out of it. It wasn’t raining yet, but the air was wet. Zhondra felt it against her skin like a soaked washcloth.
“I’ve tried and I’ve tried,” Alice said, sitting down on a step as close to Zhondra as she could get, “but they won’t listen to me. Maybe you ought to go out there and talk to them.”
“Maybe they’ll hurry it up a little,” Zhondra told her. “We’ve probably got half an hour to forty-five minutes before the storm hits.”
Alice shook her head again. “I don’t think so. They’re just setting up out there. They haven’t even started yet. They’re waiting for Carol to get back.”
“Where’s Carol?”
“In town.”
“What for?”
Alice shrugged. “You know Carol. Walking around. Feeling sorry for herself. Sitting on park benches and bursting into tears.”
“When is she expected to get back?”
“She’s expected to get back when she gets back.” Alice sounded near explosion. “Listen, Zhondra, you’ve got to do something. I can’t talk any sense into them. They’re out there with all these trees that are thin as toothpicks and they’re stark naked, too—”
“—Oh, Lord—”
“—although, really, why you have to be naked to worship the goddess is beyond me. And Dinah’s saying that litany about pubic hair or whatever and the rest of them all have their eyes closed and Carol might not get back before the storm at all, and then you know what that would mean, they’d all be rained on and probably killed in the storm.”
“I’d hope they had sense enough to come in out of the rain,” Zhondra said.
“I wouldn’t count on it.” Alice was grim. “I told you back in New York. Religion is an evil thing. I don’t care if you worship Jehovah or the Goddess Sophia or the elderberry bush in your backyard. It makes people crazy. And I don’t like the knives they use.”
“I don’t think they’d hurt anything with them,” Zhondra said. “They’re all for being at one with the earth and that kind of thing.”
“They’re going to hurt themselves, that’s what I think,” Alice said. “They do everything with their eyes closed. And I refuse here and now to go into the emergency room with them when they do and try to explain it all to the doctors. Especially here.”
Ginny Marsh was better than halfway up the drive now. Zhondra ran her hands through her thick hair.
“Look,” she said. “Here comes our visiting Holy Roller—”
“Oh, God,” Alice moaned!
“—and we don’t want her getting wind of this. Remember all the fuss she made last time? Go back out there and tell them I said to cut it out. Tell them I said I’d go make them cut it out if they didn’t come back in right away. See if that works.”
“What’s Ginny doing here today, anyway?” Alice asked. “Shouldn’t she be hiding in her basement or whatever you do in a hurricane?”