Derek opened his eyes and let them rest in the dark of his
cupped hands for a few moments after finishing the prayer. He usually prayed
before dinner in the manner of his parents, resting his head in his hands,
elbows on the table. He knew other families who offered a prayer before dinner
by simply holding their palms together in front of themselves, or by holding
hands in a circle, but they all closed their eyes. You had to close your eyes.
If you didn’t, Derek knew, the prayer didn’t count. It was a sacred minute
where he felt it was possible for God to enter the room and change things
without you looking. Every day, before partaking of the evening meal, he thus
played a game of hide-and-seek, and every time, like a child, he wanted to prolong
the possibility that a miracle had in fact occurred, no matter how small.
Lately it seemed that he kept his eyes closed longer and longer, as if giving
the Almighty extra time to fix things — things, Derek knew, he would never be
able to see.
It was a thought he pondered while driving to work, sitting on
the freeway. It was, he figured, the essence of faith. His limitations as a
mortal man would prevent him from ever knowing for sure if God had been at work
in his life (or his dining room), or not. If the traffic was particularly bad,
this line of reasoning led him invariably to the uncomfortable thought that he
was trying, in his closed-eyed silence, to out-maneuver God, to catch Him in
the act, and thus validate his beliefs. That made him feel like a cheat. By the
time he reached the office, he couldn’t wait to get to work to take his mind
off it.
The first thing Derek did once he sat at his desk was to place,
very carefully, so as to make no noise, his bagged lunch in the garbage bin. He
never looked inside the brown paper bag; he didn’t need to. He’d prefer not to
know. After he did this, he uttered a quick prayer for forgiveness, and fired
up his computer.
Derek had met his wife at church; they had been set up on a
blind date by mutual friends — a married couple who not long after Derek and
his wife married, fell apart spectacularly — in ways Derek often thought
guiltily about. There had been wild alcoholic binges, pills, rumors of
prostitutes. Derek’s new wife thought it best that they, like others in the
church, stopped taking this couple’s calls. That was years ago now, and Derek
sometimes wondered what became of them. He remembered them in his prayers, and
at night, when he couldn’t sleep, often found himself re-living outings and
dinner-dates, searching his memory for clues as to the cracks in this couple’s
relationship. He came up empty. There was nothing to point to; they had seemed
perfectly happy. Derek lay there staring at his ceiling, listening to his
wife’s breathing, wondering if anyone else would think that of him. Probably,
he thought. They probably would.
Every day, at the dinner table, Derek gave thanks for the
food, and for the Lord’s bounty, using the same words he’d recited from childhood.
His children said them too. Everyone was hungry.
Then, when he opened his eyes, he gazed at the coleslaw his
wife had served in a carved-out cabbage, and knew that his prayers had not been
answered. God had not intervened; he was being tested, yet again, by a force
greater and with more tenacity than Derek could comprehend. He smiled and held out
his plate, and even as the words “that looks lovely, Dear” escaped his lips, he
blasphemed loudly in the depths of his heart.
Salad Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1958
