Caught In The Middle. Gayle Roper
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sweat. As a compromise, I got my hair cut.
“What have you done?” Jack asked angrily when he saw the shorn me.
“I got my hair cut,” I said as he stalked around me. “Don’t you like it?”
He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess, if you like girls with boys’ haircuts.”
I looked in the mirror at the young woman with curly, spiky black hair. “I do not look like a boy.” I didn’t look like me, either, but I figured I’d get to know this stranger in time.
He ignored me and got to what, for him, was the point. “You never asked me.”
For some reason, for the first time in years, I got angry at Jack. “I’m twenty-six, Jack. I’m allowed to cut my hair with or without your consent.”
The next day I went to the library when a story I was covering took me nearby. I read the want ads in the Philadelphia area papers. A week later I had a job at The News in Amhearst, thirty miles west of Philadelphia in Chester County. In two more weeks I was ready to move.
“But we never talked this over,” Jack protested. “What if I don’t want you to move? After all, we’re thinking of getting married.”
“We are? When?”
“Sure we are. I just need a few more months, that’s all.”
I shook my head. “I have to find out who I am, Jack, who God made me to be, because I’ve forgotten.”
I determined when I first arrived in Amhearst that on work nights I would turn the TV off at ten and be in bed by ten-thirty. Discipline was absolutely necessary if I were to survive. The problem always came between ten-thirty and whenever I fell asleep. Such long, tossing, fitful, unhappy hours!
In desperation I began reviving a habit I’d had in high school and lost at Penn State: I began reading a chapter in the Bible and praying as I sat in bed with Whiskers crowded comfortingly against me. Maybe, in this way, I could calm my mind enough to sleep.
I began in the book of Philippians where Paul writes about pressing on and realized quite quickly that my father had been right that painful night on the front porch. In my total involvement with Jack, I had forgotten God.
Oh, I went to church every Sunday, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jack. I sang the hymns and praise songs with joy and listened to the pastor with a critical ear. I knew that afterward Jack would want to discuss the service and the sermon, turning things this way and that, sniffing, pawing, looking for flaws like a cat looks for life in the carcass of a caught mouse. But, I was learning with considerable pain, it was Jack I wanted to please, and Jack I wanted to worship, not God. Any joy I felt was in the touch of Jack beside me, not in the presence of God within me.
Dear God, how forgiving are you toward someone who has become as shortsighted as I have been?
Slowly, weeknights in Amhearst became less terrifying, but weekends held their own special horrors.
And so, on that early September Friday night just after my move, I found myself digging through the trash can for Sunday’s bulletin, which I had just thrown away in my brief cleaning frenzy. I pulled it out and reread it, my attention drawn to the announcement about the bell clinic. I studied the words a few minutes, uncertain.
There had been a bell choir at Penn State, and I’d always itched to play in it. To my ear, bells sound so beautiful—lyrical and somehow angelic. But I’d never had the nerve to audition at school because of the music majors.
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