The Kneeling Bus
Ellsberg, Peggy R.
WAISTBANDS & EPIPHANIES THE KNEELING BOS Beverly Coyle Houghton Mifain: Ticknor & Fields, $18.95, 184pp. Peggy R. Ellsberg The eight interlocking stories in this gentle, hilarious first novel...
...And suddenly, her mother's thin hair catches the light and turns into a halo...
...ow after her...
...In the final, revelatory chapter, twenty-five or thirty years have passed and Carrie's elderly mother visits her in Greenwich Village...
...Gray was a boy, he and his cousins had caught live rats to take over to Mr...
...My mother," Carrie says, "might as well have been speaking in tongues...
...Ladies carry hankies trimmed with crochet to dab their faces...
...The chapter ends with a really funny scene and a brief, transcendent reflection on war...
...The Willis family is easily distracted by the events of Boynton Beach: a parishioner wishes to be baptized by immersion in the Atlantic Ocean at the Easter Sunrise Service...
...Otherworldly, distracted, and indifferent, "She was lit up from the inside...
...The Kneeling Bus is composed with an original and even unique artfulness...
...Bewildered and not entirely pleased with her wealth, the mother has remained simple, restrained, and Methodist...
...Coyle's technique is revealed by one of her own characters, the muck farmer Mr...
...He was a laconic man...
...In "The Seventh Day," Carrie goes to the pet store in the simmering heat to buy a lime-green parakeet, and her beloved grandmother visits, having converted to Seventh-Day Adventism...
...In "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing," Coyle creates a pacifist schoolteacher who "practices celibacy" and "was the only World War II conscientious objector in Florida," a bizarre boy who raises leeches by giving them rubber gloves full of blood from the butchershop, and a pair of girl's underpants whose frayed waistband comes unpinned while Carrie is bearing her tray through the school cafeteria...
...In one sentence he'd have hoisted up a bloody scene-the smeared porcelain walls, the thwacks of the alligator's tail...
...Later still, a teen-ager teases Caroline for looking like Little Red Riding Hood...
...Gray...
...Caroline, her mother-once president of her college sorority-has become accustomed to a life of church socials, relying on conversational responses like "Oh dear me...
...This story, splicing all the ends of these minor details of a summer's day, concludes with thickening tension, unexpected meaning, and escalating beauty...
...Of all the carrying on,' Mr...
...And there are certain Kierkegaardian repetitions-Carrie's sister Jeanie, packing for summer camp, runs upstairs for her medicine...
...Gray said, recalling the alligator trying to catch that rat inside a slippery tub...
...Garrison...
...The Kneeling Bus in a sentence or a page hoists up a scene, a climate, a personality, a fragrance, an epiphany...
...and any day now she was going to scoot on through that gate...
...Peggy R. Ellsberg The eight interlocking stories in this gentle, hilarious first novel are told in the voice of a child (Carrie) growing up in Methodist parsonages in rural Florida...
...Carrie has a box in which she keeps a newspaper photo of the petshop keeper posing with a new mahogany Philco TV, some paper cigar rings, and a lock of her grandmother's hair...
...Carrie's mother sews herself a red cape like the one worn by the fashionable Mrs...
...Carrie's mother, characteristically, tries to smooth over the whole affair at Palm Sunday dinner by discussing it reasonably...
...The M-5 bus pulls up...
...She was going to scoot on through, leaving me here on the other side, loaded down and damned if I knew what I was going to do before I had to strip right down to the bone and follow after her...
...The intimate, demotic Southern dialogues moving toward revelation recall Flannery O'Connor, some of the characters-like Old Man Wilcox in his smelly undershirt-could have appeared in a story by Faulkner...
...Carrie is obsessively interested...
...Having her mother there makes Carrie "homesick right there in my own apartment...
...These details would have interested some of Walker Percy's characters...
...She weaves several plots together-usually three of them-and somehow they illuminate a final spiritual tableau of extraordinary wisdom...
...It kneels, "a large humble elephant of forgiveness and servitude," and Carrie's frail, confused mother climbs on...
...Her mother has inherited land in Florida right next door to Disney world, which is worth a fortune...
...and refusing to look at the glossy ads for luxury items in women's magazines...
...The time is the 1950s, and there is no air conditioning...
...A sympathetic teacher comforts Carrie by telling of the time that the same thing happened to her, and how she had just stepped out of them and kept on walking...
...In a chapter that describes the muck farmer, a wealthy orchid grower's devastating tragedy, and Carrie's decision (while receiving a polio shot) to become a missionary, we read: "One time when Mr...
...The old Southern woman makes genteel conversation with the bus driver while Carrie tries to recover from her agonies about real estate...
...But Beverly Coyle does something original...
...She cross-examines Martha, the Baptist preacher's daughter, in the mango grove that separates the two parsonages...
...Walking down Bleecker Street, Carrie inadvertently stops at a bus stop, tearfully pleading with her mother to sell the land and buy real estate in Manhattan...
...Carrie's father is charming, liberal, and vague...
...But the Methodist child could not fathom this-"the deception it would have taken to pretend my own panties had not even belonged to me...
...In the intense heat of an Everglades summer, even the cars move slowly through the little towns, and the streets ring "with no sound at all...
...In one second," she says, "my warm panties had landed on the tops of my shoes and shackled me at the ankles...
...Wilcox's place to feed a teen-age size alligator the old man kept in his bathtub...
...Later in the novel, we discover that Jeanie is dangerously asthmatic, and the incident of the medicine falls into place...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
