Grif Stockley: Religious Conviction

When I remind Rainey of the trial, she gets an irritated look on her pretty, pixieish face and says, as usual these days, that I’m missing the point. She argues my worldview (so-called “logic” supported by scientists who are forever changing their theories) is culturally determined and can no more be “proved” than what’s in the Bible.

Perhaps to serve as a buffer between us during this pricklish period, Rainey has invited my daughter, Sarah, to dinner with us and has already picked her up and brought her to her house. The less time Rainey and I spend alone these days the better we seem to get along.

There was a time when it seemed we were on the verge of getting married, but at crucial moments one of us, as Paul Simon says, slips out the back. Jack.

Sarah, a high school senior and a daily reminder of her mother, who was a devout Catholic, comes to the door and whispers, her lovely face woeful, “We’re having soup, salad, and corn bread Virginal-looking (I can only hope on that score) in white sweats, she lets me give her a brief hug. Though we do not always under stand each other these days, we remain affectionate, usually forgiving each other our respective generational baggage.

“Good,” I say, meaning it. Rainey’s soups are a meal in themselves. I follow my daughter through the living room and glance at Rainey’s numerous bookshelves, wondering if I will begin seeing religious works in this eclectic stew of a library. My girlfriend is a reader, and last summer was on a kick when she zipped through the novels of a woman named Jane Smiley and pronounced her the greatest living American novelist. Other seasons she gobbles serious nonfiction works like chocolate-chip cookies. Thick tomes on Freud, Arabs and Jews, and racial discrimination are regular additions to the McCorkle collection. How an intelligent, well-informed woman can regress to such a narrow view of life’s meaning is beyond me. Does a brush with death numb a person’s mind to such an extent that she can swallow a book whole and not taste the indigestible parts? It seems so transparently childish I am amazed that Rainey can’t see what she is doing.

I catch a whiff of curry as I enter the kitchen behind Sarah. Rainey, in Lee jeans and a man’s workshirt, is peering into her refrigerator, which is covered with notices of do-gooder happenings: tickets for a silent auction for the Battered Women’s Shelter, a note asking for volunteers to work in the food tent for an Arkansas Advocates for Children amp; Families benefit, a reminder of the next meeting of an AIDS care team. Rainey, a social worker at the Arkansas State Hospital, apparently can’t get enough of human suffering. Maybe this new religious venture is a natural step, but before she gets on the boat and heads for Calcutta to work with lepers fulltime, I’d like to make love to her just once. Charity begins at home, I have reminded her.

At various times in our tortured two-year relationship we have acted like passionate pre-sexual-revolution teenagers who stopped at necking on her couch, or best friends who have taken care of each other in our darkest moments, but never lovers. Watching her hips tug against soft denim as she reaches down for a bottle of salad dressing, I am reminded again how sexy this woman still is at the age of forty-two. Tendrils of frizzy red hair hang past her elfin ears and frame her full mouth, which today is painted pink, like the azaleas soon to bloom in her front yard. When her eyes, this moment the color of blue-corn tortillas, flash with anger or delight, my heart pumps a little harder.

“Smells great,” I say, edging over to the stove for a look.

“Sarah cooked it,” Rainey says, grinning, as she turns around to face me. Her smile tells me that she adores my daughter; no surer way to a father’s heart. She has been good for Sarah. Having raised a daughter of her own, she is content to enjoy mine, and Sarah’s selfconfidence has blossomed with Rainey’s praise and encouragement Over the last two years their friendship has grown as steadily as Rainey’s favorite oak, which I can see budding outside the kitchen window. Rainey and I would surely be married by now if our own growth were as inevitable. If I dropped dead, I’d want Rainey to take Sarah. I have a sister, but we aren’t particularly close.

We all laugh at this obvious lie. Nothing Sarah and I cook is more exotic than hamburger meat drowned in AI. sauce.

“I made the salad,” Sarah says with a grin, taking Rainey’s teasing better than she would if it were coming from me.

“Dad,” she adds solemnly, looking at my striped tie, “you dress like you’re the manager at McDonald’s.”

I look down at my shirt. It is a decent enough Arrow.

Orange stripes go with the tie. My pants, from Target, are gray.

“What’s wrong with that?” I sputter. I thought I looked pretty good today. Sometimes I don’t match.

Rainey surveys me.

“The one downtown,” she says, nodding at Sarah.

“What’s wrong with that?” I say. I know who they’re talking about. Clean, polite, efficient, he always looks presentable to me.

“I take that as a compliment,” I say, preparing for the worst.

“I’m sure you do,” Rainey says, winking at my daughter.

“You’re a lawyer!” Sarah exclaims.

“You ought to wear suits.”

I do sometimes, but if I know I’m not going to court, I can’t bring myself to wear one. Suits I associate with weddings and funerals.

“Having to go to work every day is bad enough,” I say, knowing my defense is falling on deaf ears.

“I’m not going to make it any worse.

That guy probably makes a fortune.”

At the dinner table I move our main topic of conversation from my clothes to the Razorbacks, which is appropriate given the season of the year. How will the Razorbacks do in the NCAA basketball tournament? In the legends that surround the Kennedys, one that has stuck with me as the myths have accumulated is the story that among his other accomplishments, old Joe, the father of a president, an attorney general, and a U.S.

senator, insisted that his children discuss world affairs at dinner. If table talk about geopolitics is a requirement of greatness, my daughter and I are doomed to the sticks.

“The best thing that ever happened to the Hogs was moving to the Southeastern Conference,” Sarah pronounces buttering corn bread that is soft as cake.

“Playing Kentucky, LSU, and Alabama has got to toughen you up a lot more than blowing out TCU and Texas Tech.”

I bite into cucumber and lettuce and chew.

“I miss playing Texas,” I say after I swallow.

“God, we hated them.” How boring my life would be without the emotions of resentment and envy.

Rainey, who is not a sports enthusiast but keeps up out of necessity, asks as she squeezes lemon into her iced tea, “Doesn’t it seem strange that even though nearly all the players are black, people still care as much as they did when they were white?”

“We only care if they win,” Sarah observes, looking to me for my response. My daughter is at the age where she challenges almost every utterance out of my mouth.

My relationships with other women, the way I practice law, and my treatment of Rainey (who sometimes seems more like a saint than a woman to my daughter) are all put under a microscope and rarely seem to pass inspection.

I sip at a goblet of Cabernet red wine I picked up at Warehouse Liquor. Ever since “60 Minutes” aired that piece about how the French develop relatively little heart disease, I have religiously drunk a couple of glasses for dinner and have escaped criticism from the two women in my life. Knowing I will get Rainey’s goat, I say, “If they win, we don’t care what color they are. That’s what makes this country great. Winning is everything.”