JOURNAL ENTRY: SAT. JAN. 11, 2003
by Ginny Wray
When Paul answered the phone and whispered the name Lynette, I made the gesture of resting my cheek on my folded hands so he'd pretend I was taking a nap. Lynette is Paul's oldest sister and we've never been close; she lives somewhere in Arkansas with her fifth husband, and is a Pentecostal Baptist in whose church they practice speaking in tongues and the laying-on of hands. Any Sunday, or possibly any night of the week, the congregation might just be found rolling on the floor with the Holy Ghost, but I don't even know if it's something devoutly to be wished for or not.
The last time we spoke, she'd asked how the results of my bone scan had come out, and when I told her they'd found a tiny spot on my shoulder, she'd cried out, "Oh, my sweet Lord!" Her crying scared me so much that I broke too into tears. I can't figure out how a woman chased by the devil day and night can be in almost constant touch with the Almighty, but she said she knew there was a reason God had wanted her to call. And then I thought I heard her ask, "And what are your favorite cookies?" (chocolate chip with walnuts), which she was going to bake for me whether I liked it or not.
"I'll wrap them in popcorn, just the way we used to do during the Second War when we made cookies for the troops," she said. One week later, I opened a box that had originally held a Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven, and found three dozen perfect (though she said they weren't her best) walnut-studded chocolate chip cookies, none of which was broken, layered lovingly in a large plastic bag of perfectly popped Orville Reddenbacher's buttery tasting no-fat Microwave popcorn.
So now I was sitting at the kitchen table with Paul and listening. For a long while, Lynette did most of the talking, and when Paul did speak, he lowered his voice conspiratorially, looking too troubled (what could she have been saying to him?). She talks very very fast, has a soprano's bird-like voice, the tones of which I could hear if not the words. When Paul called her Darlin', I thought he was falling under her influence again and letting her persuade him to go with her, in glory, singing the Lord's praises at the pearly gates when the graves yawned opened at the end of the world.
"Yes, Sugar, I love you too," he said. "I'll tell her."
When he hung up the phone, his worried expression disappeared and he was smiling, beaming.
"What is it?" I asked. "What's so funny?"
"She's sending you a handkerchief," he said. "Actually, it's a prayer hanky."
I made a variety of questioning faces, trying to figure it out.
"She's going to pray over it."
"She's going to pray over some hanky? Is there any hanky-panky involved? Or swinging live chickens over your head?"
Paul said, "I'll tell you all about it, if you really want to know."
"Yes, I do," I said, wanting to know how far people can take this kind of thing and still get a driver's license.
"Well, a prayer hanky is used for healing. They're usually put on the affected areas of the body, but she just wants you to put hers under your pillow and feel the peace. When she anoints a hanky, it's as good as a blessing from God."
"Wait a minute," I said. "A blessing from God? Has it ever worked before?"
"I definitely should have asked her," Paul said.
"Maybe the cookies work better than the Lord does?"
"So she anoints them – any plain old hankies – with any kind of oil she has around the house – corn oil, let's say, and the oil is supposed to be a kind of intermediary or focus point to get God's attention and his mercy. She's been praying that you'll feel peace from all fear. I don't think she believes that it's magic or anything; she just wants to pass on his love to you."
"She's going to send you some Bible verse too, probably including the 23rd psalm. 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for Thou art with me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.'"
After my lung surgery, I was, from time to time, too ill to push the pain release button on my morphine IV drip, and I don't remember that my good friends came to visit for half an hour. I was, in fact, beginning to hear voices coming from outside the slightly opened window, and if I tried hard enough, I could see a blurry figure that might have been a man at the outermost edge of my peripheral vision. I also knew that there was no man, and that the voices must have been coming from the nurses' station just outside my door.
So I was drifting in and out of this doped-up semi-consciousness when Jackie appeared in my room and asked if I'd like a wash.
I closed my eyes, opened them again, but she was still there. "Are you real?" I asked.
"As real as you are," she said.
It was dark outside; only a few lights were shining from the apartment building across the street, so it must have been the middle of the night. I realized then that since I'd come to the hospital, since I was first diagnosed with cancer, no one had touched me, no one had even examined me. I would never have been able to ask to be taken care of, so I said, "Yes, gladly. A wash."
She had brought along a yellow sponge in a green rubber tray that she filled with warm soapy water. She helped me to sit up, and pulled the hospital gown off my shoulders. She washed my arms, hands and fingers. I felt no shame; it didn't matter who I was or what I looked like because I had the feeling she'd seen it all before.
While she washed my collarbones and the back of my neck, she was quiet, and it was so peaceful. I didn't say a word, if only to feel more intensely the sweet unexpected pleasure of the water on my skin, the sponge moving along my breasts and stomach. Then she lay me down again and washed my legs and feet. And with no incantations about my enemies or the evil they might do to me, without intercession from God or hankies or holy oil from K-Mart, Jackie anointed me with her sponge.
Ginny Wray
March 1947 – March 2003
©2003 by Paul J. Wray.
GINNY WRAY's poetry and creative autobiography have appeared in Absinthe, Big Bridge, Carve Magazine, Eclectica, Eyeshot, Hope Magazine, Linnaean Street, nycBigCityLit, Pindeldyboz, PoetryBay, PoetryMagazine and Samsara Quarterly. She held a B.A. in Literature from Purchase College, and was on the editorial board of Fictionline. Her family established a memorial fund at Purchase College (SUNY) to support creative writing at her alma mater. She died on March 15, 2003 of cancer.