Culture wars

I ask Sheila and Francine in identical short black nano-puff vests would they like to see my house. I’ve known them 20 years, our acquaintance manufactured

on taste: hard Swedish lines, invulnerable cherry floors,

everything long and low, typewriters and turntables. Their approval

means less than it used to, but not nothing. In the study, where Picador paperbacks play it cool along squat black shelves, Francine leans over my desk to read what is hung there: “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” C. S. Lewis. I’d forgotten about that, about church, how sometimes

I go, how sometimes I read the liturgy, and inevitably weep

when we sing, “Here I Am, Lord,” and keep each bulletin,

and tape the especially stirring ones to my wall, because relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done. I watch Francine read and some latent impulse leaps to explain, but it’s too late — she knows. I remember my dad coming for Parents’ Weekend at Sarah Lawrence, how an hour before his arrival I began the panicked, painstaking work of taking down the posters: Queer Nation, Act-up, Lesbian Avengers, Silence = Death. But the exertion of de-gaying was too much and I felt, at long last, landed, home, too safe

to care. “He can deal with it,” I announced, and from her bunk Alicia

appraising me, “Oh, sweetie, he already knows.”

I know Sheila and Francine will not be back. From the porch

I watch their smart outerwear sheening crisply with distaste

as they hasten the distance between irony and God. — Heather McNaugher