Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston

Author:Sonja Livingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3750-0
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2010-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Religious instruction was an intimate affair at Corpus. In earlier years, classes had met in cracked plaster rooms, grouped according to age, and students were given lessons on the Bible and morality by nuns or similarly inclined women. But when Father Shea was assigned to the declining inner-city church, he shook things up. He pulled children out of dusty classrooms and paired them with the new parishioners who flocked to the church from the suburbs upon his arrival. Birkenstocked vegetarians who said “God is love” replaced polyester-skirted nuns who said “God is watching.” Studying other religions, preparing Passover dinner complete with Manischewitz products, and writing poetry from the heart, replaced rote memorization of the beatitudes.

I was paired with Julie Augsbury. She was young and fresh, and though I followed her around like the tail of a kite, I was not inclined to follow directions. I refused to write self-esteem poetry, for instance, and was not quieted by matzo crackers and kosher grape juice. I insisted on choosing my own topics, firing off questions about premarital sex while she did her best to steer our lesson back to the prodigal son and the nature of forgiveness.

“Do you understand why the father welcomed his son back?” Julie asked, looking me in the eye, hoping the mystery of her question would snare me.

“Because he was stupid,” I answered.

“Is that what you think?” she asked, her face pink.

I laughed.

She labored.

“What would you feel like if you were the other brother?”

Her attempt was noble, but I strayed.

Again and again.

She’d redirect.

I’d sneer.

Until her patience finally gave out and she requested a reassignment. She got a sweet-faced seven-year-old eager for poems about matzo and I got Sylvia Kostin, the fingernail-inspecting elementary teacher whose name meant serious business to anyone who’d sat through her third-grade class at Corpus Christi School.

Anyone but Mrs. Kostin, I thought, suddenly finding myself entirely capable of prayer. I ran to find the golden-haired Julie, eager to spout my understanding of the prodigal son and the nature of forgiveness into her ear.

“If I was the other brother, I’d resent my brother, be angry with my father, but in the end, I’d forgive them both,” I said, grabbing at her hand. “Forgiveness is so important.”

Julie shrugged. It was out of her hands now, she said, a bit of satisfaction squatting in the corner of her eye.

Older than my mother and rumored to wear a wig, Mrs. Kostin scared me. No way, I said of my new tutor, but by then, my mother was back at church and in charge enough to demand that I continue instruction with Mrs. Kostin. Sylvia Kostin. The teacher I feared and didn’t want to sit next to, but who, it turned out, was patient and calm and, as she set a story before me and asked me to consider the nature of love, brought out those same features in me. She sat me under the tulip tree in her backyard, serving lemonade while I read, and whether because of her

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