The Wednesday prayer was not Catholic, but ecumenical, all inclusive. Julie would intone, "Lord God, Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah, you have many names. We call on you to guide us in following procedure. Amen." That was it. No long, memorized prayers that no one really understood. Nothing that she felt would offend anybody's religion.
On Thursdays, everyone would stand silently for three minutes (no more, no less), thinking of whatever they wanted to think of. Julie would have preferred that they thought of nothing at all, since that was what she learned from a television show about meditation, but she didn't know how to impose that, particularly on teachers who had to think of what they would do the moment the children would be inside their classrooms. So she contented herself with the three minutes of silence.
On Fridays, everyone would do what professional singers and theater performers did before performances – vocalize. She once tried having everyone do what she read on the Web –massage the temporal mandibular joints, stick out the tongue, yawn, sing "Ahh" going up and down the scale – but too many students ended up laughing. She now merely asked everyone to shout "Ahh" as loud as they could, then to whisper "Om" as softly as they could, then to sing the first two verses from George Frideric Handel's Messiah. Five Hallelujahs made her Fridays. Even if they were sung off-key. Even if they were not exactly the lines of Psalm 117.
Saturdays, of course, were not for the children but for Frankie. She would tell her husband that she had to catch up with work in the school, but she would really either spend the whole morning in bed with Frankie or watch a movie with him on the days she had her period.
Sundays, after the obligatory Mass with her husband, were for pretending to like pottering around the house.
There was one thing she liked about her husband, though, that she did not get from Frankie. She and her husband would have seemingly endless arguments about some verse in the Bible. Like her, her husband loved reading the Bible. Unlike him, she looked at the Bible as a literary text and not as a religious document. Their intellectual debates were the closest she got to having simultaneous orgasm with her husband. In fact, it was the closest she got to having an orgasm at all with him.
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Love After Heaven
RomantizmA murder victim gets a chance to return to earth to meet his wife and her lover. He still loves his wife, despite her complicity in his murder. But he returns to earth not as himself but as a priest! How can he and his wife come together again? What...
