Skinny Matilda's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

The shaking did not stop when Matilda sat down at her kitchen table. It kept going for two hours after she ate the peach. Her hands rattled the envelope she had written on. She counted the tremor in her fingers instead of counting looks, and that felt like trading one bad habit for another. She had spoken up twice in three days, but each time cost her the rest of the afternoon. If the old man with the white beard came at her again, or someone at the store did, she was not sure she would have the legs to answer. She needed a place to steady herself. Somewhere quiet, where no one watched her. She thought of the small chapel at the edge of town. She had passed it a hundred times and never gone in. The next morning she put on her bikini and walked there before the sun was full up. The door was unlocked. Inside it smelled like old wood and candle wax. The pews were empty. She sat in the back and put her bare feet flat on the floor, the way she had pressed her heel into the dirt at the hedge. She breathed. No one came in. No one looked at her. After a while her hands stopped shaking. She stayed until the bell in the steeple rang once for the hour. On the walk home she stopped at the country grocery store for bread. She was calm when she went in, and she was still calm when she saw the neighbor from over the fence, the one who had listened to the old man gossip. He was standing by the register. He saw her and his mouth opened like he meant to say something. Matilda kept her hands at her sides. She walked to the bread shelf, picked a loaf, and brought it to the counter. He watched her the whole way. She did not count him. She paid and said thank you to the clerk. The neighbor with the crossed arms and the white beard was not there, but his friend was, and his friend said nothing. That was new. Outside, Matilda held the bread against her ribs and felt her pulse. It was steady. She had found a room where the noise stopped, and she had come out of it able to walk past a witness without folding. The shaking would come back. She knew that. But now she knew where to go when it did. She wrote the chapel down on the back of the same envelope, under the two other lines. Three things now. A short list, and a place on it that was hers.