Short Story by Pam Eason
Image: “Baseball Girl in Japan” from the George Grantham Bain Collection
Callie was looking for something more, something … divine, something full of grace and truth, and she thought to start with the closest thing – herself. Why not? “A good all-around athlete,” that’s how the Rochester Rocket’s girl’s high-school softball coach described her in the Register article that reported the popup she’d caught, finalizing the score. “What a catch! So graceful,” her father had said. She knew it was all fear and miracle, but she didn’t correct him and imagined herself in rightfield, poised, hands and head raised to the sky, like a ballerina.
A ballerina, a divine ballerina, that’s how she began to think of herself, and that image lasted all the way through college and into her marriage with James, who looked at her like she really was divine. In their new home, she shook the fresh bamboo sheets and just unboxed towels from the dryer with a graceful flap of her arms and twirled in the big open laundry room, the fabric swirling around her. She tiptoed the delicate dishes her grandmother had given her from the washer to the cabinets – releve position, knees straight, heels high, for the upper shelves; plie position, both feel flat on the floor, knees bent over toes, for the lower shelves. That glorious deception lasted until she got pregnant, and, nauseous, and heavy, and any divine grace she thought she’d had shrunk as her belly swelled.
So, she named the little angel in her arms, Grace. She did look gloriously divine after all, all silk and softness. But as one year turned to two and three, when Grace pouted and kicked and threw her food and screamed until she got her way, Callie’s illusion of grace in Grace dwindled like her bank account after the grocery. Despite the rebellion that lasted fourteen more years, Callie held tight to Grace, until Grace turned right, out of the drive, to a new life seven states away.
Callie’s hunger for something more increased like the time that lay vacant without Grace to fill it. She turned to yoga, but quit when the teacher said, “The divine is within you.” She knew it was a lie. She said so to her friend who swore she’d felt so much grace that it had buckled her knees and driven her to tears. “Glorious.” That’s the word her friend used, how she’d described him. “Divine.” Truth fell heavy and hard in Callie’s trembling hands like the softball in rightfield.
“… We saw his glory—the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, …” John 1:14, NET.
