Because a popular and picaresque county fair was in progress, all the hotels were booked and she’d had to sleep in her car, which she could at least park on a quiet street. She was woken at dawn by a high, excited voice calling, “Come on! Come on, you little weirdo!” The voice was ecstatic with love, and Carol sat up heart first; a lady in a pink bathrobe on the front steps of her porch beckoned to a young dog that was wagging its tail at the edge of the woman’s yard. It was a neighborhood where Carol and her husband used to take walks, and, though she knew this yard by sight, the red flowers, the decorative stone animals, and the twirling little ornament in the shape of a star looked eerie and foreign in the dawn light. She had not seen the robed woman before or the dog, which ran at her, barking, when she started the car.

She got breakfast by herself at a diner, and thought about going by the motel to say goodbye to the “boyfriend.” Instead, she picked up her cat at the vet (she had boarded the animal overnight) and drove to her new home: a sunny two-room annex attached to a red Dutch Colonial on a residential street without a sidewalk. The furniture (saggy couch, weird end tables, mismatched dining set) looked as though it had come from a Salvation Army showroom display, and, as she learned later, it had. Her bedroom looked out on a lot overgrown with wildflowers; her sitting room faced the neighbors’ yard, which had strong, confident grass and a hammock full of children’s toys. Carol’s yard was mostly weeds, but there was on its periphery a beautiful tree with spreading, somehow joyous branches; she looked out on it and felt dim, seeping gratitude for its beauty.

Carol was fifty-seven but she did not feel that old. She did not feel any age. She might have liked that ambiguity. But instead it was frightening, as if she had found herself on the wrong side of what had suddenly been revealed as the iron law of the world. This feeling was made worse by the realization that no one occupied the Dutch Colonial she was annexed to; being attached to an empty house felt like being attached to the ghost of her marriage, unable to live in it or to get away from it. On her third night in Rhinehorn, she went out at dusk and, not even caring if anyone saw her, pressed her face against the windows of the empty house and peered in. The place was not only much bigger than hers, the furniture in it was nicer than what she had. It was generic and bland, but at least it all matched and the couch probably didn’t sag when sat on.

She looked on the bright side. Her rent was next to nothing, which meant that she could pay down the ruinous debt she had accrued by trying to support Lloyd’s life-coach business as it had gone bust. The bed was comfortable, the TV was huge, the cat loved the yard, and Carol enjoyed watching the little creature timidly patrol its border. The job was O.K. (routing students through the correct channels, making keys, paperwork, constant screen time); it was essentially work that she could forget as soon as she returned to her temporary home in the evening. Although Carol had a master’s degree in English and had once wanted to teach, she had long ago accepted this kind of work and was good at it.

There was peace in this: she watched the news while exercising with a hula hoop for twenty minutes, ate, played with the cat, then walked around the neighborhood feeling her body shifting tectonically under her brain. Despite her age, she was still bleeding almost monthly, and this anomaly was a strain on the organization of her self. The sky of her psyche had gone Technicolor with hormonal discharge; it was full of huge, luridly burning stars. The most pacific grasses and meadows of her inner being were subject to sudden sinkholes full of bone and bilious tissue, spilling over with the multifarious faces, the intimate crimes and errors of her life, all pulling her in the opposite direction as she walked forward, saying hi to people and their dogs, mostly middle-aged except for one bent but fast-moving old lady with an alert husky. She passed yards where children played while adults dug around in border gardens or sat on porches exuding hard-won security. She never spoke to them and they did not speak to her—until the smiling husband across the street from her paused while weeding his powerful grass, rose out of his squat, and invited her to come for dinner sometime. She glanced at the house; it was white with red shutters and there was a clay relief of a flying bird hung next to the door. She said, “That would be nice.” Her neighbor introduced himself as Duane; he said that his wife, Dana, was in H.R. and was friends with the woman Carol had replaced. “She’s on maternity leave,” he needlessly explained. “She’s with her husband, who’s sixty miles away. They work in separate towns most of the time.” “Oh,” Carol said. “That sounds tough.” “It is,” he said. “I think somebody’s going to have to change jobs.” His two little girls swung crazily in the hammock, kicking at each other and crying, “Who who! ” Or something like it.

She went back home, drank wine from a juice glass, looked at TV, answered e-mails, watched animal videos and horrible accident/crime videos, some porn. Strictly speaking, she didn’t watch porn, but she had got interested in a magazine think piece about torture porn. The cover image was striking and even artistic, and the article described a particular film that had been made by a former prostitute about her experience of being tortured by a psychotic john; she said that making the film and performing in it had been a healing experience. Carol could not resist: she looked up the trailer for the film online and saw that, yes, it was about torture. The woman was shaved, beaten, starved, made to wear a leather mask, and then taken to the desert, where she was forced to run until she collapsed. Carol described it to her younger friend Meg on the phone. “Do you believe that?” Meg said. “Do you believe she really made the movie because it would be healing?” “No,” Carol said. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it was healing for her.” They talked about Meg’s fiancé for a while, then Carol got ready for bed, loved up the cat, and had low-key sex thoughts about the guy she’d run away from the night before coming to Rhinehorn. Her mind eased into sleep, calmly sorting images of what she’d done that day—then woke with a jerk, as though she’d hit the brake on a car driving in deep mud, wildly swerving. She concentrated on the cat’s little body next to her and thought, Steady. Then she was in the jaws of a shark, screaming and fighting as it yanked her back and forth, down into churning water. Hold steady.

The people at the dean’s office were extremely thoughtful and (because they assumed her husband had ditched her?) almost too nice. One of them was at least able to tell her something about the Dutch Colonial: it was normally used for a visiting-professor position but this year the invited visitor had cancelled at the last minute and the backup couldn’t come until January. “I didn’t even know there was an outbuilding,” the woman said. “I mean an annex. I wonder what they put that on for?”

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Eventually, Carol had dinner with Dana and Duane, the people across the street. Their home was well kept but bloomed in the corners with complex personal detritus, kindhearted art and a raucous heap of toys extruding stuffed-animal legs and the heads of dolls with food-coloring hair. Music played from a laptop—a soft and shining voice sang “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The younger girl, Ada, waltzed to the sound of it while the older one, Estella, sighed with impatience at its silky slowness. Carol handed Dana the caponata dish she’d brought, an eggplant salad with four tablespoons of brown sugar even though the recipe called for two—because who could expect kids to eat eggplant otherwise? “Oh, it looks great,” Dana said and put it on the table along with the beef-rib dinner she’d made after, probably, a full day of H.R. Duane, who taught junior high, beamed and bantered with the children about their projects until Estella snapped, “Oh, Dad, stop pretending that everything about us is so great,” embarrassing him into silence.

They prayed before eating, asking God to remind them to always help those who had less than they. Carol wondered for an affronted moment if maybe they meant her. Then she thought, Well, it’s O.K., I do have less than them, and tucked in. Dana was a great cook and an unusual conversationalist, though afterward Carol could not remember anything they had talked about, except (dimly) the reasons that fracking was not entirely a bad idea and the mysterious existence of certain early mammals, the funny shapes of which Ada’s first-grade class had made into cookies. Instead, she remembered the warm feeling of life in the house, the layers of it. She remembered Dana’s white, loose-fitting face with its frame of nonde brown hair indicating the plain female of the species: no vanity, nothing meant to allure. Practical intelligence, nimble strength, and deep animal will were her traits. Duane, in comparison, seemed human and heady but pliant, wanting to please and be pleased; he had been visibly hurt when his eight-year-old daughter had snapped at him, and it had not occurred to him to snap back. Dana had not seemed to notice, but Ada had; her face went grave at the insult and she lowered her eyes. She seemed the happier of the girls, shiny-eyed, vibrant, and sun-brown, with deeply colored lips. Estella was paler and more recessive, already critical and disappointed. But she was a nice kid. She didn’t want to eat the caponata, but when she tasted how sweet it was she gave Carol a look of pleasure that landed very gently.

It was a nice evening that somehow had the effect of making Carol feel shy about seeing her neighbors again. Instead of walking in the evenings, she began to drive around the country surrounding Rhinehorn. This place was mysterious to her; there was a character to it that felt just outside her range of experience. The road into the farmland was a county road, sparsely lined with economically mismatched houses—beat-up boxes with meagre strips of yard were situated next to charming farmhouses set back amid leafy trees. Carol was mesmerized by the mixture of colors and textures flashing past: grasses, stone fences, an old wooden house stripped of paint, a bush unselfishly extending its bright-pink flowers against the wall of a dull-green house, making the drab color into a gorgeous celadon. There was a family she saw often outside a dirty-looking white house, hanging laundry, lounging on a torn, filthy couch, and, once, cooking on a tiny grill on their patch of lawn, standing and eating off paper plates, no table, just a Styrofoam cooler of canned drinks. She glimpsed a plump girl in shorts, fiercely chewing, and a shirtless man with a fat back, crouched at the grill, his body radiant with generosity as he handed somebody a plate of meat. Carol passed them going fifty-five but still they affected her, like some submerged memory, a torn photo of a forgotten family stuck randomly in an old album. Then came billboards offering debt resolution, gym memberships, and help for feminine incontinence, and one for something called “The Acceptance Journey” that depicted large, benign-looking people of color hugging one another. She thought, It must be something to do with church, that last one.

Back in the annex she would turn on the TV and drink while watching non-stop news rehashing situations she had already heard about. She changed the channel at ten-minute commercial intervals to watch shows about terrible crimes. It was a mashup of mayhem, real and imagined: old people buried alive by their friends’ kids who had cleaned out their bank accounts; a woman held captive and raped in a storage locker for months; a bullied office worker avenging himself violently; a scrawny teen-ager trying to defend Islam by blowing up a school. Sometimes Carol watched, drank, and cried; sometimes she texted somebody from her old life and described how boring it was in Rhinehorn. Once, she passed out crying and woke at two in the morning with her face numb against the disgusting carpet, her phone clutched in one hand and the worried cat pawing her ear.

Where would she go after this? How could she live? How were any of them going to live? Her poor husband or even her crazy “boyfriend,” whose wife had left him with no warning, taking the pots and pans with her. No wonder he was on the lookout re: sodomy.

It was late November when she came home and saw an envelope sitting in the crotch of the tree in her yard. She thought, Someone has written to me! She reached for it eagerly and turned it over to read the address. It said, “To the Grinch.” She opened the envelope and read, “Dear Grinch: How are you? We are good. Are you getting ready for Christmas? Are you at the Whos’ already? Here is what I would like: silk slippers from Target (pink and silver), a ceramic cat and kittens, a beauty kit in a vinyl case, it could be leopard or zebra if they have it. I know it’s early, but I want to give you plenty of time! Love, Estella.”

She e-mailed Dana and discovered that, according to family lore, the Grinch used the tree in Carol’s yard as a mail-delivery system; Dana had meant to get the letter in the morning but had been late for work. Carol said she would bring the letter to Dana the next day, then surfed some animal videos. But she was thinking of the heap of toys across the street, the winking corners, the music; the family seemed to her like pink flowers against a dull background. She e-mailed Dana again and said, “Would it be O.K. if I wrote back to Estella? As the Grinch? It could be fun!” And almost right away Dana answered yes. Excited, Carol got a notebook of lined paper and wrote her message in a crude, Grinchy hand: “Hey Estella, this is the Grinch. I was staying with the Whos but we had a big fight so I left. I’m back to hating Christmas again, and I’m spending it in the cave with my Winged Servants. But even though I hate Christmas I still like you, and I’ll see about that list! Your friend, the Grinch.” She tore it roughly from the binder—she thought this was what a Grinch would do—and put it in a plain envelope addressed to Estella, which she then placed in the tree.

“At least someone cares about this place.”

The next day, she took a different turn off the county road and found herself in a less populated place. This road was mostly pastures and fields of crops, tucked in and fallow for the winter. The few houses were set back so far off the road that she almost didn’t see them. The sun had just gone down, and white light glowed between the darkening sky and the dormant fields, the crouching, saturnine orchards. Hers was the only car on the road then and she was surprised to see, on such an untravelled byway, another billboard advertising “The Acceptance Journey.” It, too, depicted pairs of large, benign people of color, men and women looking joyfully at her with their arms around each other. Carol felt a rush of emotion, the strong desire to go wherever these people were, to accept and to be accepted. She wondered if a white person would be allowed in; not long ago, a white man had gone to a black church claiming that he wanted to pray and had murdered people instead. But was the billboard advertising a church?

When she got home, Carol surreptitiously checked the tree and was sorry to find no envelope. The next day, there was no envelope, or the day after that. Carol quit driving and began walking again, hoping to run into her neighbors. She did see them; they smiled and waved. Ten days passed and still there was no envelope. Finally, Carol approached Dana from the street and asked if Estella had got the letter. “I read it over her shoulder,” Dana said. “She didn’t say anything, but she got very stony. Then she went upstairs. Duane asked her about it at dinner, but she said that it was personal and she didn’t want to talk about it.”

Carol began apologizing, but Dana said, “Don’t worry about it—she might still write back to you. I’m curious what she’ll say.”

Carol went back to the annex, poured some wine, and called her sister Grace, in New Jersey. She told her the story and concluded, “What kind of snowflake is this kid? It’s a Grinch, what does she expect?” She meant to be funny, but her sister didn’t laugh. She went on, “I mean, you gotta let a Grinch be a Grinch!” Her sister said, “I’m surprised the girl’s mother would let you write to her like that. I mean, she doesn’t know you; you could’ve said anything.”

“I guess she thinks I’m a nice person,” Carol said.

“Oh, I’m sure she does. I mean, you are a nice person! But still. If it were me—”

Carol gritted her teeth. Her sister had stopped working because her son had Asperger’s and she didn’t trust anyone to babysit him; it wasn’t just that anyone could be a molester—although anyone could, even girls could—it was that more subtle damage could be inflicted by incautious words, hurtful facial expressions, an insensitive lack of attention at the wrong moment. Grace’s husband owned a coffee company that had made him rich, so leaving her job might have been a reasonable choice—except that then the marriage had broken up and Grace had found herself a single mother with next to no job skills, at the age of fifty-three.

“You don’t know what’s happening in the little girl’s life,” Grace said. “She could be especially sensitive to any kind of rupture.”

“I don’t know why. Her parents are the most stable people in the world.”

“How well do you know them?”

It was Grace who had ended the marriage. Her husband had never got over his disappointment at having an autistic son, however high-functioning, and his unkindness to the boy had caused such a rift that for the past five years the couple had slept on different floors of their house. Grace’s therapist had urged her to separate for the sake of her son and for her own self-esteem. Grace’s hairdresser had urged her to wait it out: “I believe there’s still love there, but even if there isn’t you have to take the long view—eventually he’ll die and you and Jonny will have that big house.”

Carol wasn’t sure who was right, the therapist or the hairdresser, and lately neither was Grace. But, listening to Grace describe her online-dating experiences, Carol was thinking hairdresser.

After she hung up, she decided to write another letter. This time she chose to write on unlined printer paper, which seemed a little nicer. She wrote, “Dear Estella: I am one of the Grinch’s Winged Assistants and I am writing to you because the Grinch is too embarrassed to write himself. He is very upset because you didn’t answer his letter and he thinks you are angry at him about the Whos. Just between you and me, Estella, he’s angry at himself. He knows the fight with the Whos was his fault but he doesn’t know how to apologize. I know he cares a great deal about what you think, and I’m wondering if maybe you could write to him and give him some advice. I think it would make a big difference! But please don’t mention that I asked you! Secretly Yours, Winged Assistant 002.”

Because it had been two weeks since the last letter, Carol decided to distress this one so that Estella would think the Winged Assistant had written sooner. She sprinkled it lightly with water, then took it out to the yard, where she rubbed it with dirt, walked on it, then buried it under a pile of leaves with a rock on top. She let it sit there for a day, then took it back into the house and let it dry on the heater; in the interim, she e-mailed Dana and, when she got the O.K., she went across the street and knocked on the door. Dana let her in with a subtle dramatic flair; Carol spoke in a tone of bewilderment tinged with wonder. “Estella,” she said. “I found a letter in my yard that seems to be for you. It’s from someone calling himself a Winged Assistant.”

“I know who that is!” the child said, jumping up from the sofa.

The next evening, there was a letter lying in the lap of the tree.

“Dear Winged Assistant: I’m sure that if the Grinch apologized the Whos would accept right away, they are so nice! But I can write to the Grinch. If you tell me what the fight was about, it would help me give advice. Love, Estella.”

Carol drank, watched TV, and thought about what to write back. For some reason, she thought of the couples counsellor she and her husband had seen, a woman named Mitzi, with long, powerful arms and a glass eye. Mitzi had seen each of them alone first, and then the two of them together. When Carol came by herself, Mitzi had asked her why she wanted to break up with her husband. Carol had said, “I don’t. I just want to have sex with other people.” Mitzi had a chest of toys in her office and she’d asked Carol to choose a toy that best represented the part of her that wanted so badly to have sex with other people that she was willing to jeopardize her marriage. Carol chose a troll doll with pink hair and a rhinestone navel. “So,” Mitzi had said to the doll. “Who are you?” Carol had felt a perverse, exultant glow sneak over her face. She’d smiled and said, “My name is Legion.”

On her favorite show, the F.B.I. was closing in on a serial killer who disembowelled women and made them scrub their own guts off the floor until they died. As always, the heroes had figured out who the killer was through computer-based psychological analysis. They had scientifically deduced that his mother had been a maid who had dropped dead while working for a sadistic rich woman. This show nearly always ended with F.B.I. agents bursting in on the villain in the midst of his last crime and shouting, “Drop the gun! We know what you’re going through!” Which seemed a tall order in this case.

She wrote, “Dear Estella: Thank you for writing back. What happened is this. The Grinch was at the Whos’ and he was helping them get ready for Christmas early, like usual. He was wrapping the presents and . . .”

“How do you see the next five years of your life?” Mitzi had asked. “What would you like those five years to be like?” Lloyd had answered, “I want us to own a house with a guest room and two bathrooms. I want dogs and maybe a horse. I want us to live securely with our animals.” Plainly moved, Mitzi had turned to Carol. “And what would you like for the next five years?” Instead of speaking, Carol had jumped up and started dancing. She’d danced around the office, gyrating her hips, singing a wordless song, her hands out as if she were holding onto somebody’s thrusting hips. Mitzi had stared in horror. Her husband had laughed, as if it actually made him happy to see her dance, and maybe it did. They used to dance in the living room like that, wildly and comically.

“. . . right when he was wrapping his present for his favorite little Who girl, she ran up and said, ‘Is that for me? Can I see it?’ She got so close that she saw the present and the surprise was ruined. And the Grinch snapped at her and made such a terrible face that she cried and ran away.”

Lloyd had laughed in the therapist’s office but he cried in his sleep and tried to punch her in the face. The next day at breakfast he said, “You’ve dishonored me.” She pounded the table and cried out, “I’ve dishonored you? What is this, the Army? If it is, I’ve been the good soldier. I’ve paid for everything! And I don’t care about honor anymore. I want to live! I want love! I want love!”

“You have love,” he replied. “What you want is to destroy yourself.”

“Every woman I’ve ever been with said she loved me,” her boyfriend had said. “I don’t even want to hear it.”

“How about if I say it and you verbally abuse me?” she’d suggested.

He’d considered this for a moment. Then he’d said, “You’re desperate for something. I don’t really know what it is but that’s O.K. I like desperate people.”

“The Grinch was so embarrassed that he went into his room and didn’t even come out for dinner. But when a kind Who mother—she saw what had happened—brought him some food, he realized he had to come back out. When he came out and saw the little girl he’d scared, he tried to smile at her. But, because he was ashamed and didn’t feel like smiling, it came out like a terrible Grinch-face and she just ran away again. Which was too much for the Grinch. He went to his room, opened the window, summoned his Winged Assistants, and fled back to his cave.”

The murderer, the serial killer, had been cornered as he loomed above his terrified victim. “Drop the gun!” an agent cried. “We know what you’re going through!” But the murderer was too desperate to surrender; he tried to shoot the agents and went down in a hail of bullets. Carol turned off the TV. Somehow, somewhere inside her, love and torture had got squished together. And it wasn’t just in her. As the idiot box dutifully confirmed, it was always happening, of course it was happening: torture disguised as love and healing, and sometimes the other way around. Love would always try to love, and torture could only torture. People try to make the two things be friends—we know what you’re going through!—and sometimes it even seemed as though they could be; they were, after all, often attracted to each other.

She could not think of what else the Winged Assistant could say about the Grinch, so she just went to bed.

She woke early the next morning and decided to go for a walk. It was clear and cold when she started out, but clouds rolled in suddenly and it started to snow. The snow made the town quiet; it seemed as if the only people on the street were old men walking heavily, as though they were coming to the end of a long journey. The sudden snowfall had a bleak magic that touched a simple place in her: the need for and love of home. The old gas station with its flying horse, the hardware store called Crest, the gift store with its assortment of novelty belt buckles, coasters, artificial flowers, and hand-knit purses, the liquor store that gave you discount points, the small, elegant oblong of an apartment building with “The Saratogan” spelled across its stucco front in stylish metallic —what kind of person would put that building here, and what would it be like to live under the fading spell of its signage? She heard church music, so faint on the wind that it was like something at the very bottom of a half-remembered dream: not beautiful but mysterious, a toiling incantation, with voices surging under it and a lone voice shouting over it, vibrating between supplication and command. Baptist, she thought, and turned intuitively down a side street toward the sound.

“From nine to one, you will be answering e-mails. From one to two, you will be out to lunch. From two to five, you will be answering the e-mails that came in while you were out to lunch.”

It was a street of houses that looked put together as if they were toys, fast and with secret, cockeyed affection. One of them, originally white, had been roughly painted with giant superheroes speeding in fight mode across its walls, their faces blurred and their shapes too botched to be recognizable except—great red Christ!—there was Spider-Man, his arms spread triumphantly between two upper-story windows, scarlet toes grazing the frame of the front door, friends and enemies ranged about him like angels, menacing and celebrating.

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December 24 & 31, 2018

The house was mischievous and pagan, but still it seemed in league with the church just a few doors down. The church was a triangular building with a modest personality, despite the pink-and-green neon sign announcing “Springfield Baptist Church,” which protruded from its side like a thought balloon. Its main door was open and thronged with people, and the organ music poured out, toiling and mysterious no more, rising with ease and cheer. A black man in a dark suit with a woollen scarf around his neck stood at the center of the congregation as people came to him singly and in groups, black people brightly dressed in their good coats and winter boots, smiling adults and children bursting with energy, one boy breaking away to make a snowball that he hastily dropped at his mother’s command. Carol stopped in her tracks. The Acceptance Journey! Her heart beat with amazement and she impulsively crossed the street, hesitated, then got in line behind a cluster of middle-aged women, who were being greeted fulsomely by the gentleman at the door. “What you doin’ out here in this weather, pastor?” a frosted-haired lady asked in a joyful and submissive voice. “Where’s Jerome?” “Jerome is not feeling well today, Miss Janice, and, besides, I want to welcome back sister Eunice, first time back since she broke her hip!” The women praised God with words and powerful “um-hmm”s. Then one of them noticed Carol with a quick up-and-down.

Carol was suddenly timid. The man did not look at all like a pastor to her. He was slender, straight-backed, and youthful in appearance, martially impervious to the cold, with a strict manner that was accentuated by his suit. Carol now felt confusion on top of timidity, and she must have communicated it because he appraised her sideways before she even got to him, and when he met her eyes it was with the look of someone assessing a possible problem. But, even with those eyes, he took her hand and spoke with sharp, shapely kindness. “Welcome, sister. You’re visiting our fellowship today?”

“I don’t know,” Carol said, aware of the women regarding her with erect alertness. “I wanted to ask . . .” She trailed off. The women were all wearing skirts and high-heeled boots. She was wearing black jeans and a gray parka.

“You are welcome to pray with us,” he said, softening his eyes, even squeezing her hand, realizing, it seemed, that he was merely looking at a confused and timid woman. “I’m Pastor Robertson, and you are?”

“Carol,” she said and hesitated. “Um, I was wondering, do you do Acceptance Journeys here?”

“We accept everybody,” the pastor replied. “More important, Jesus accepts everybody. We accept—” He looked past her with a burst of feeling. “Hello, Strongs! Glad to finally see you, sir!” A smiling, middle-aged couple walked past, woolly in their coats. Politely, Pastor Robertson turned back to Carol. “We accept everybody in Jesus. Is it something particular you are needing today, Karen?”

“Something called an Acceptance Journey?”

“You mean a faith journey?”

“No, it’s Acceptance Journey. I saw it advertised on a billboard on . . . on . . .” She realized her mistake but did not know how to get out of it. “It’s a picture of people hugging each other,” she said. “Like some kind of special group where people . . .”

A look of understanding came to the man, followed by an adamant adjustment of his expression. “I know the billboard you are referring to,” he said a little curtly. “We don’t do that here—Hey! I saw your boy out on the field the other day, he looked great!” A bouquet of smiles and friendly sounds went past in the quietly thickening snow.

“You can come in and pray with us if you want to,” the pastor said, coming back to Carol. “But we don’t offer what you are looking for.”

Carol blushed; she opened her mouth and tried to speak. But the pastor turned away to greet a very old white woman hobbling on a walker, assisted by a young light-skinned black woman with a kind and intrepid face. The old woman looked down with pulled-in lips, concentrating all her effort on moving forward, but the young woman faced Pastor Robertson with confident expectation, which he answered without missing a beat. “Roberta! So glad to see you, my dear! Eunice, God bless you—” and Carol walked away. She didn’t even feel that she was being rude, or, more precisely, she didn’t care. She felt rebuffed and bewildered. We don’t do that here—don’t do what? She walked down the block, fumbled in her purse for her phone, and tried to Google “Acceptance Journey.” But she had no service. She walked all the way around the block, Googling vainly and repeatedly; when she arrived back at the church, the door was closed. She stood before it, listening to muffled music and voices crying “Jesus!”

My name is Legion—well, no wonder she’d said it. There was a legion of voices and faces in her and around her, cruel and ruthless and loud, talking gigantically and dancing lewdly while between their prancing legs a blind little creature stumbled, squeaking, “I want love, I want love!” Carol was touched by the image of the old woman with her walker, working so hard to move forward. She wished she could go into the church and pray, but she couldn’t imagine herself there, among good people so profoundly linked. Instead she closed her eyes and listened to the music and prayed. She saw the naked prostitute running in the desert; the woman was playing a part she’d chosen, at least in the movie, but still Carol prayed for her, for people to find her and give her water, wrap her in cool sheets, take her to where she could be nourished and get well. She couldn’t imagine people helping the man who had tortured her, so instead she prayed for angels—masculine angels with wings like those of powerful birds or bats, strong and leathery, the tendons and bones visible—who would wrap him in those wings and the wings would speak to him and hold him.

The music stopped. She opened her eyes. She heard the pastor speaking but could not make out his words. The snow was sticking; the wind had come up. She decided to get something warming in her for the walk home.

She chose a place she’d never been before, a place at which she did not expect to find anyone she knew. It was cheap and colorless, except for orange-and-white-checked tablecloths, but cakes were displayed, and pies with red filling; the overhead heater roared. An elderly waitress who was cleaning the floor with a dry mop said, “Seat yourself, I’ll be right with you,” and Carol found a table. In the seconds it took to walk to an open table, her glasses fogged, and she took them off before removing her coat. She was cleaning them with a napkin when Dana spoke to her from the next table, a welcoming greeting completely contradicted by her expression, which was that of someone trapped.

“Oh!” Carol said. “How are you?”

“Well, I’m here,” Dana said.

“Yeah, me, too.” Don’t worry, she transmitted, I don’t want to talk, either. She looked at the laminated menu already on the table; eggs, pancakes, fruit salad, cottage cheese, bagels.

“What brings you out in this weather?” Dana asked.

“I went for a walk.” Sandwiches, sausages, spaghetti, onion soup.

“Wow. You have healthy habits. I cut church and drove here.”

It was unmistakable; she did want to talk. Her face said, “Oh, no, not you,” but her posture was uncertain, and in her voice Carol could feel the pressure of need. Sure enough, she said, “I needed a break. Some time alone.” She glanced at Carol, then faced her. “My mother died last summer.”

Carol said she was sorry. The waitress brought coffee. The death was expected but terrible and had sent Dana’s unstable only sister into a mad pinwheel of illness and addiction that Dana feared would end in homelessness. “The safety net is being punched full of holes,” she said. “I’m afraid her disability will be taken away. I wish she could just come and stay with us for a little while, but Duane didn’t even want her to come for Christmas—at least I prevailed on that.”

Dana’s rice pudding came. Carol ordered a vegetable omelette with fries. Dana apologized for oversharing; she asked what Carol was doing for Christmas. Carol revealed that she was spending it with her sister, who thought that she, Carol, was crazy.

“You?” Dana said. “You don’t seem crazy. You seem independent and tough.” She jerked her chin up, as if giving her props.

“Well, first I spent a lot of money on my husband’s kooky business, then I left him. She left her husband, too. But he was an asshole. To their child. In my marriage, I was the asshole.”

Dana looked at Carol directly, eyes creepy with supposition. But she said, “You don’t seem like an asshole, either.”

“I didn’t feel like one,” she said slowly. “But I think hardly anybody does.”

“No asshole would answer a letter in a tree from a kid.”

Oh, actually, one might. “Speaking of that, how’s Estella?”

Dana shrugged and began to meticulously pick the raisins out of her rice pudding. “She thinks a lot. She feels a lot. She’s sad about her grandmother. She’s picked up on what’s gone on between me and Duane. About my sister. Honestly, I think that’s why she took your Grinch letter so hard.”

“I’m writing another one,” Carol said. “It’ll be better.”

“I hope you realize you don’t have to,” Dana said earnestly. “Only if it’s fun for you. It should be fun.”

They sat silently for a long moment, Carol picking at her fries, Dana finishing her coffee. The café was clearing out; the waitress gathered loads of dishes in both arms, gallantly blowing a stray strand of hair from her face as she walked. Carol wanted to tell Dana just how not like an asshole she’d felt. How her body had suddenly surged with a strength and confidence she’d never had before; she didn’t really know when it had happened, but the volume had been all at once turned up very high inside her, and men were able to hear it, sometimes even young men: she’d walked into a bar near Penn Station one afternoon and a young man had said, “Excuse me, but you have such a beautiful face, you are glowing!” He’d offered to buy her a drink and she’d said no, but she hadn’t taken her eyes off the young man until he left the bar and, oh, she wished he hadn’t. If it wasn’t that night, it was a night soon after that that she’d dreamed of a lion leaping to embrace her with its huge paws, showing her its teeth and claws but not hurting her, instead holding her with love in its powerful body. Very soon after that a friend had sent her a video set to a bombastic love song, about a lion who’d been rescued as a cub, ecstatically embracing his rescuer and rubbing against him like a cat. She hated the bombastic song, but, still, after the dream the video had seemed to her like a sign, a sign that plainly said, If Lloyd can just quit his job and do what he wants, then I should do what I want, too.

But she didn’t tell Dana any of this. Instead she asked her, “Have you ever heard of something called an Acceptance Journey? I’ve seen billboards up and I can’t tell what they’re for.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dana said. “It’s some kind of outreach to gay and transgender people; some of the professors are involved in it. Why?”

“Just wondered.”

They got their checks; Dana offered her a ride home and she accepted. It was a struggle getting out of the parking lot, and the streets were slick. At the intersections, heavy old traffic signals swayed on their wires.

“Do you think Estella knows it’s not really the Grinch answering her letters?” Carol asked. “I think she knows and doesn’t know at the same time,” Dana said. “She’s at an age where she can believe in things that she knows aren’t real.” She paused. “What kind of business was your husband trying to run?”

“Well, acting was his first love, but he was a social worker. He developed a special relationship with a client who would actually pay him to go on business trips with him, basically to keep him off drugs. So he decided to quit his job at the clinic and become a life coach. Which might’ve worked out if the one client hadn’t overdosed. But he decided life coaching was where it was at. He thought he could get back into acting while being a life coach. He thought anything could happen. And so did I. In a different way.”

“Anything can happen,” Dana said cheerfully.

“Yes,” Carol, said. “Unfortunately.”

They pulled up to Carol’s house; Estella and Ada were in the front yard, at the foot of the tree. Carol got out and they ran to the car, Estella shouting, “The Winged Assistant came! But he didn’t leave anything!” The girls went back across the street to regale their mother as she got out of the car. Carol went to the tree and saw what they were talking about: the puzzling tracks of what was perhaps a very large bird. And at the edge of her vision she could see, or half see, a Winged Assistant, stork-legged, swift, and subtle, coming to check the tree.

Carol went into the house, back to the letter she’d started.

“You may be wondering why the Grinch was so embarrassed. The thing is, Estella, when somebody’s heart grows very big very fast, as happened to the Grinch so many years ago, sometimes it can be too sensitive and get confused. Because it’s suddenly bigger, it feels things bigger. That’s what happened to the Grinch. He got confused by his feelings and doesn’t know how to get back on the right track. He’s basically not sure he can still be good. It would help to know that you believe he can!”

Carol put the letter in an envelope and went out in the car to look for a long pair of barbecue tongs. The snow had begun to come down again, in gigantic flakes, soft, slow blobs that reminded her of Oobleck. Without knowing why, she thought of the time, toward the end of their marriage, when Lloyd had said, “Why did you have to talk about it? Why couldn’t we just lie and cheat like everybody else?” She smiled.

She found some excellent tongs in the housewares section of the humbly striving Tops. While she waited in the checkout line, she pulled up Lloyd’s number and thought about texting him. As she was doing that, Dana texted her and asked if she would like to come to dinner. She said yes, and picked up a bottle of wine at the liquor store that gave a discount for shopping at Tops.

It was a low-key dinner of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread; they held hands and prayed before they ate. Carol looked for tension between Dana and Duane but didn’t find it. She remembered how, when she had felt the most desperate about her marriage, people would tell her, “You look so happy.” They had silly conversations, about a book they had all read in high school, about whether fracking really would come to Rhinehorn, about how just five years ago you could not have imagined a President whose third wife had posed naked; they discussed whether this was a good or a bad thing. Carol glanced at the girls; Estella was looking supercilious, Ada was eating her bread with greasy, dream-faced absorption. Dana said that there was a possibility that the woman Carol was replacing might not come back, which would mean that Carol might be able to stay on, if she wanted. Carol said, “Oh, really! Nobody told me that!”

She came home around nine, had a juice jar of wine, watched a movie about a heroic horse that had fought for the Allies in the First World War, and typed a text message she didn’t send. It was just past midnight when she put on her coat, put the Winged Assistant’s letter in her pocket, and got the tongs. The plows had come and banked the snow, which was now falling lightly or perhaps just drifting. She went to the wooded edge of the empty lot beside her place and found a light bough that had come off a small pine tree. She walked back into the street, sweeping her tracks with the bough.

The night was clear, and she could see stars. Snow rested thickly on each tree branch. She thought of the music she’d heard outside the church. She thought of her prayers. She felt wonder and pain. But she didn’t concentrate on either. She concentrated on sweeping away her tracks and then on gripping the letter firmly in the tongs. She stretched her body over the piece of yard between the street and the tree and placed the letter.

作者: Mary Gaitskill

来源：纽约客（2018.12.24&31）

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