Miss Wattie remained stoic. Her large, heavy-lidded eyes hardly seemed to blink, but a close observer would notice that her full lips clamped in tandem with every Birchie head shake. The Reverend Richard Smith was new to the church, and very young, and prone to passionate sputtering about the Beatitudes. He told everyone to call him Pastor Rick, and sometimes, when he mentioned hell, it almost sounded like he was putting air quotes around the word. Worse, there were no detectable air quotes when he mentioned dinosaurs. Neither Birchie nor Miss Wattie could approve of him.
The old pastor—a properly powder-dry fellow of their generation—had died. Instead of promoting Jim Campbell, the blandly handsome, middle-aged unter-pastor, the church had called this new boy. He’d been born respectably enough in Alabama, but he’d gone to Golden Gate Seminary out in California.
As far as I could tell, they’d returned him with his old-school Southern Baptist doctrinal stick-in-the-butt still firmly lodged, but he also owned a pair of man sandals and did not eat red meat. Worse, he’d alternately coaxed and needled every single First Baptist member onto Facebook. Even Birchie and Wattie had signed up, strictly as a kindness. He’d betrayed their goodwill gesture by making the church newsletter completely virtual. To save trees, he said, but it meant they’d actually had to learn to turn on the computer I had gotten them. To my grandmother all this meant he was now “from” California, which was practically Babylon—the setting of a thousand movies about fornication that she flat refused to see.
“And he sweats when he preaches,” Birchie had told me on the phone. In her small, pursed mouth, “sweats” sounded like a curse word.
“I’m sure he can’t help it,” I’d told her.
“He most certainly could. The church has air conditioning.”
Birchie should know, as she had single-handedly paid to install it in the 1970s, when she was going through the change of life.
“The pulpit is right under the vent, but he won’t preach from it,” Wattie chimed in. They were on speakerphone. They’d always liked to have a share in each other’s conversations, but over the past couple of years they’d used the speakerphone more and more often. These days they took every call in tandem. It had happened so gradually I thought nothing of it. “He puts on that headset like a pop star, waving his arms around and jogging back and forth.”
“It’s true!” Birchie confirmed. “I feel like I’m watching that communist Fonda girl on one of her tacky aerobics tapes, what with all his gyrations splashed across those . . . screens.”
“Everybody’s using screens now, y’all,” I told them. “And no one watches tapes. Or does aerobics, for that matter.”
I heard a skeptical “Humph,” but I didn’t know if it was Birchie or Miss Wattie.
“They only put the lyrics on that screen,” Wattie said. “How can people sing without the notes?”
Birchie said, “I swan, Lois Gainey has not been on key once since those screens went up. He says the hymnals were getting ratty, but I offered to replace them. Twice.” I understood from her tone—anyone would have—that Miss Birchie’s considerable resources had not been available to help with the installation of screens.
All this change notwithstanding, Birchie was happy in her pew. Today the church was holding its Summer Kick-Off Fish Fry on the lawn. It was a tradition as long-standing and almost as venerated as Birchie herself.
As a kid I’d been to it every year; I’d spent every childhood summer down in Birchville. I wasn’t a football fan or a fish-the-Coosa River sort, but I’d loved Birchville anyway. Birchie bought me chalk in every color; I’d draw comic strips a block long, every sidewalk square a panel. She’d made Batman and Star Wars patterns on graph paper to entice me to learn needlepoint, and I’d needed no reward but the pie to want Wattie to teach me how to make her perfect crust. She and Wattie together sewed me a new Wonder Woman costume every year. I was allowed to run all over town wearing it, acting out Super Friends with local kids until I heard Birchie ringing the porch bell that called me home for supper. In Norfolk I could only wear it in the house. It embarrasses Rachel, my mother told me, her pink cheeks testifying that Rachel was not alone.
For me summer began with the taste of catfish rolled in cornmeal and coarse salt, served up crisp and smoking hot on paper plates with sweet tea in Dixie Cups. Iceberg and cherry-tomato salad drenched in homemade ranch dressing. Cheese grits. Fried okra. Huge wedges of icebox pie for after. That meal was still the very taste of freedom to me.
This year it was drizzling outside, a thing Miss Birchie’s prayers had not allowed to happen on Fish Fry Sunday for decades. Probably God weighing in on Pastor Rick. But there was no canceling or postponing the Fry. The youth-group boys simply crowded the tables into the fellowship hall. As Miss Birchie and Miss Wattie came in, arm in arm, Pastor Rick was there to greet them.
“Now, there’s no need for you ladies to wait in line. Come have a seat. We’ll bring you plates.”
This was one thing he got right. No grandmother-aged lady or pregnant woman had ever had to stand in line at a church social. Pastor Rick walked Birchie and Miss Wattie over to his own table, already packed with deacons and Associate Pastor Campbell and his wife, Myrtle. Birchie took the seat across from Frank Darian, her lawyer, who lived and worked out of the big blue house two doors down from Birchie’s. He was the only man at the table who wasn’t part of church leadership, but his wife, Jeannie Anne, was the children’s minister. It was a part-time job involving hand puppets, and therefore open to women.
Pastor Rick came back and set paper plates down in front of each of them, saying, “Here we go! Here we go!” His wife was right behind him with their drinks and napkins.
The plates were wrong, though. No catfish. No fried okra. No iceberg salad. Instead there was what looked to Miss Birchie like something ready to be mailed—a rectangle of parchment paper, tied up in a string.
“Well, now, what’s this?” Miss Wattie asked.
“It’s salmon. It’s wrapped and steamed with fresh herbs and spring vegetables,” Pastor Rick said.
A moment of silence. Wattie turned to whisper something, her lips almost touching Birchie’s ear. A lot of Birchie’s conversations happened with Miss Wattie whispering to her in full profile, Wattie’s breath stirring the snowy fluff of tendrils that had escaped Birchie’s bun. It was so common a sight these days that no one thought anything of it. Not right then.
“But this is the Fish Fry,” Miss Birchie said, emphasis on “Fry.”
“It’s called salmon en papillote,” Pastor Rick said.
“That sounds French,” said Birchie darkly, but poor Rick missed the tone.
“Yes! Yes, it is French,” he warbled happily. “And so much healthier.”
Birchie looked like she might say more, but Wattie stayed close, her voice a breathy background noise, soothing Birchie down. After a moment Birchie’s sparse lashes dropped, and she said, “Well, let’s try it, then.”
Miss Wattie turned to face her own packet. Her full lips compressed into a wide, flat line. She’d calmed Birchie, but she made no move to try this wrongful food herself.
Birchie peeled back the wrapping to reveal a pile of bright green asparagus and a few cherry tomatoes, their skins wrinkled from the steam. Her mouth pursed and pruned into a dot, the exact opposite shape of Wattie’s but expressing the same feeling.