“Maybe.”
“But once you’ve been really and truly born again, there’s no going back,” Ginny said confidently. “Once you’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit, you’re a child of God forever. God wants us to be His children, Ms. Meyer. He wants us to be saved.”
“I don’t want that picture up on your desk, Ginny. I don’t want the PTL Club on the radio—”
“The PTL Club isn’t on the radio. It’s on TV.”
“Whatever. I don’t want that kind of thing, here. Most of these women feel they have been very damaged by patriarchal religion. They didn’t come here to be reminded of it.”
“I asked Bobby what that meant,” Ginny said. “Patriarchal. Bobby said it meant ‘of the fathers.’ There’s nothing wrong with fathers, Ms. Meyer. God is our Father.”
“I know you think so, Ginny. I think God is a fiction that men made up to keep women down.”
Ginny tapped a single finger against a single computer key. “If I can’t at least put my picture up, Ms. Meyer, I’m not going to be able to work here anymore. I have a right to freedom of religion. Just like anybody else.”
“There’s no such thing as having a right to freedom of religion in somebody else’s house.”
There was the sound of something hitting against the side of the house: a stray branch, a piece of lawn furniture somebody had forgotten to bring inside. Zhondra and Ginny both turned toward the noise at the same moment. Ginny turned away again almost immediately. Zhondra watched her fiddling with the keys again.
“Well,” Ginny said. “I’m very sorry about this, Ms. Meyer. But I do have to make a point of it.”
“I’m afraid I have to make a point of it, too, Ginny.”
“I’ll just finish up here today,” Ginny said. “And then I won’t come back again. I’d appreciate it if you had my check for me when it was time for me to leave.”
“I think I could manage that, Ginny, yes.”
“I don’t mean to be mean,” Ginny said, “but it’s a matter of principle. That’s what Bobby says. It’s a matter of principle and a test of my love of the Lord.”
A test of my love of the Lord, Zhondra thought—and then she got a perfect vision, in Technicolor and three dimensions, of a scene from one of those bondage and discipline magazines, complete with whips and chains and leather straps to hold the woman still. Lord and master. Ball and chain. Zhondra stepped back a little, startled.
“Ms. Meyer?” Ginny asked.
“Yes,” Zhondra said. “Never mind. I just thought of something. I have to go now, Ginny. It’s like I said before. I have something I have to do.”
“Oh, yes, Ms. Meyer. That’s all right. You’ll have my check for me today?”
“I’ll have it.”
“That’s fine, then.”
Zhondra didn’t know if it was fine or not. She just knew she wanted to get out of this room, and away, before her mind came up with any more sexist filth. Sometimes it seemed as if all there ever was in her mind was sexist filth, but that was another story.
One of the good things about being very, very rich was that Zhondra didn’t have to deal with anything she didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to deal with this.
6
NAOMI BRENT BEGAN TO have trouble with the computer at fifteen minutes to twelve. By then, the Bellerton library was as secure as it was going to get. The first-floor windows had been boarded over with plywood. The first-floor books had been moved to higher shelves. The first-floor computer equipment had been brought up here, to the tall-ceilinged old rooms where the Linnet family had once slept and made love and worried about sick children. Naomi liked to imagine herself back in 1925, with a picture hat and gloves that matched her shoes. She liked to think of herself romantically, in a sense too old to apply to those nasty books they sold down at the drugstore, books with names like Passion’s Furious Flight. She was only thirty-five years old, but she was already a cliché, and she knew it. Old-maid librarian. Repressed southern spinster. Gothic horror story waiting to happen. Every morning Naomi Brent got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She counted the lines on her face and the dark circles under her eyes. She told herself that hope was useless and there was no point in going on. Then she took a shower and made herself up and forgot entirely about the fact that she had been married three times.
Of course, she had also been divorced three times. When Naomi got to thinking about her marriages, she got to thinking about her divorces, and that made her feel worse than thinking of herself as a dried-up old virgin who had never been touched. Actually, virginity was not Naomi’s strong suit. She had slept with her first boyfriend when she was fifteen years old and had just made the Bellerton High School junior varsity cheerleading squad. She had slept with her latest boyfriend just ten days before this storm. In between there was a blur of faces and bodies, hands and lips and rough-skinned backs, all rimmed round with a glow of frustration. Naomi Brent had no idea what people were supposed to feel when they had sex. She only knew she couldn’t be feeling it, because by and large she felt nothing. She got into bed with some man and let him pump and pump away at her. She closed her eyes and counted the number of stockings she remembered hanging on her line at home, or tried to pin down a piece of dialogue she’d heard at the movies and hadn’t quite understood. Her last husband had been emphatic: Naomi was a cock tease, or something worse. Naomi remembered thinking at the time that he had hair growing out of his nostrils, and how was she supposed to be attracted to that? Men always seemed to shrivel into moldy old prunes as soon as you married them. Men always seemed to end up being men. Naomi thought of her mother, married thirty years without a break. She couldn’t understand it. She especially couldn’t understand it with her father, who smelled of beer and bellowed, who was cruel in a heavy-handed, relentless way that was really a desire to kill.