Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories - Softcover

The liquor store, with its lit up Art-Deco façade, had looked like a miniature movie theater to Stephanie when she was a girl. A place of ever-changing escape. The bottles on the wooden shelves gleamed brownly in the store's dim interior. It smelled of bergamot-Earl Gray tea. Aunt Caroline had a back room behind a louver door, and in the back room were stacks of library books and magazines, a chintz-covered easy chair, a hassock in the shape of an elephant, a chrome hotplate whereon a battered copper teakettle perpetually simmered, tea things-wire balls and spoons, cream and lemon wedges in Tupperware containers-and other comforts. Lemon Drops. Baby blue tissues. There, in Aunt Caroline's back room, Stephanie had discovered the world. Reading Denise Levertov and Margaret Mead. Listening to public radio. Stephanie, too, went away to college, and she did not return until she entered the motherhouse and Aunt Caroline had become old, unreasonably so it seemed. Her legs were swollen below the knee and she kept them wrapped in white cotton towels she purchased from a Goodwill. The towels were imprinted with Emerald Hotel. She soaked them in an herbal solution that stank to high heaven. Her feet were crippled: bunions and corns signalled stormy weather. Her glasses were heavy and she refused to consider surgery to correct her vision. She'd had a life of promise but Speedway had pulled her back in, like a raveling thread.

Where Stephanie had grown up, with Aunt Caroline nearby, the houses had a muddied, shrunken look, as though time and the elements were beating them into the ground. Gutters dipped and tapped in wind against the aluminum siding. Storm drains clogged with twigs and trash. Whenever her family came to visit the motherhouse, it was as though she were forced to go back. Back to their front yard turned into a parking lot for the Indy 500, her father in a T-shirt, collecting twenty dollars a car. Back to her mother's bottle of tears from a statue of the Virgin Mary. To Grace's filthy ashtrays and her smoke smell. And the television always on. Disjunctive memories. Permanent and substantial. She often thought sinfully, pridefully: how could I have come from there?