Read Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) for Free Online Page B

disappeared, but every time I saw the smudge where it had been, the dark feeling returned, a feeling like being out of my depth in water that, only a few yards back, had felt safe. I think it might have weighed upon Nina, too, to be disappointed so immediately by the cousin she’d traveled such a distance to see.
    It was spring break. I wonder if Nina’s mother, my aunt Ursula, searching for something to hold her daughter’s attention during the string of unstructured afternoons, had had to convince Nina to leave her friends behind for a week or if my cousin had been eager to glimpse the fabled Golden State, that place with the wide sun-smacked streets, Disneyland, and its own cavalcade of television stars moving freely among ordinary mortals. Whatever her reasons were for coming, and whatever she had been expecting, what Nina found in Fairfield was a hot, dry, low-to-the-ground expanse of white-, yellow-, and olive-colored stucco houses set behind uniform rectangles of lawn. Disneyland was a whole eight hours away by car, though in me, perhaps she’d run up against what may have struck her as a Disney-like fantasy of the way the world worked: if you’re a good girl, everything will be okay .
    I couldn’t help it. I was steeped in the wisdom of Little Visits with God , fearful of disappointing my heavenly Father—and worse, wounding my mother with anything less than exemplary behavior (or infuriating my actual father, whose eyes would redden when he was about to scold us with one of his go-to phrases, like “Stop that infernal racket,” or if one of us had really done it, “Get outof my sight”). When I saw other boys or girls misbehaving, I was shocked, pained for their parents, who would have to take them aside and explain how things ought to be done. I’m not sure, now, why it is the parents with whom I identified. Perhaps having so many older siblings helping to reinforce our parents’ wishes had made me hyperaware of what was expected of children and what kind of work went into showing them right from wrong. Once, sitting in the grocery store aisle in a metal shopping cart, I watched a boy my own age pump his legs back and forth as if he were on a playground swing. His mother had turned her back, comparing labels or price stickers on boxes of cereal, and in the few moments he had to himself, the boy worked up enough momentum to wheel himself several feet up the aisle. At one point, he and I made eye contact. He smiled recklessly, waiting to see if I was going to imitate him, but I was too dismayed by the thought of sending my mother scurrying after me to give it a try. Besides, what he was doing was naughty. If it wasn’t, why had he waited until his mother’s back was turned to try it?
    My mother was proud of my decorum. She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey. She would give me instructions once, and I’d do just as she said, never considering the alternative. Obedience came so naturally to me that I am sometimes now perplexed by my own daughter’s equally adamant belief in the primacy of her own free will. Sometimes, I catch myself feeling cheated out of what I had naturally expected would be my due: a child so willing to please me she’d be incapable of doing anything other than what I ask.
    Nina struck me as my inverse, my photographic negative. She wasn’t dangerous or bad—I see her behavior now as quite adorably spirited—but she knew how to test things, there on the sidewalkor in our living room shimmying to her own tune: If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, / Come on, sugar, let me know .
    “Why don’t you tell Nina about Jesus,” my mom suggested to me one morning before my cousin had ventured downstairs.
    Anticipating the conversation that would ensue, the engine in my chest picked up speed. Not because I was embarrassed or because I was being asked to attest to something I didn’t believe, but because I wanted to make a good case, to get it right and