Elf (Part 2)

*

In the little hotel room the phone kept ringing. The man at the desk said that a very sophisticated woman had kept calling. No messages, I want the real thing. I want to talk to that girl. Elf shuddered every time the phone rang. It was surely the devil calling. More on that later.

She couldn't stay in her room. She went to the church office and asked to see the father. Who might you be? asked the stiff lady. I took him home last night, Elf said, from where I found him to be. The place your assistant gave me.

I think you'll know that he's in no shape for idle chat, said the stiff lady.

Are you one of those who thinks the Lord wants us all to be hollow and perfect? Are you one of those who has a big thing for the concept of sin but won't allow any of us to be a sinner? Not even a fashion plate who models the power of forgiveness?

So you're saying I can't see him, Elf said and went back to her terrible hotel room. And the phone rang and rang.

So she gave up and went back to Elise's town, now her town too -- she huddled back in the square clean burrow of her SRO on the edge of town, and waited for the phone to ring. She spent Thanksgiving alone, walking around the closed up town, enjoying the feeling of having a city, walking by the church, passing it, rounding the block, walking by, passing. I can't go in there. People go in there but the people who go in there are not me. The person walking into the sanctuary can't be me because... I don't go to church, for one thing. It's not in my repertory. Walking around the block, walking around the town, getting a bit cold. Seeing Elise come out with her friends. Hiding. There is something in there I perhaps need. But I can't go in.

So after these strange evasions, which she herself could neither explain nor simply leave to hang unexplained, she finally went back to her room, heated a lean cuisine turkey dinner in her little microwave and stared at the phone on the verge of ringing, then it rang.

She picked it up. It was her mother Duessa. Darling, I've found you at last.

*