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Show Moon - 94 Anne's odd disconnectedness to her body came and went like the tides during the two years in the States after Germany. Most of the time, she felt fine, though now and then she had to pause and instruct her body to perform even a simple task like pouring milk into a glass. To pursue James with the question, "What, exactly, did the doctor say?" was an option she'd decided against. Nor did she wish to ask her mother or her sisters or her daughter the content of James's self-pitying alarm that had summoned them to the cottage when they'd returned from Germany. The hysterectomy experience had made her wary of doctors, and she knew that neither the doctors nor her family trusted her ability to cope with knowledge about her own body. She had no women friends to confide in, for though they'd lived in Washington a brief while before Germany, everyone she'd begun to know had been sent off to various outposts. As if she were on the edge of a lake, she threw out a line and found rising from the depths surprising comfort in her childhood religion. Knowledge of her body, coming as it did from the material world, might not help her. To name illness, Ruth had taught her, was to give in to Error. The way Ruth had gone about not-naming was cruel and unloving, for she was a woman filled with old sorrow and rage. But if you looked beneath individual personality to the enduring principles, Ruth might be onto something. So Anne returned to the Christian Science church, ignoring James' sullen looks on Sunday mornings. She visited a practitioner, a woman in her sixties with blue hair and lovely alabaster skin, who listened to Anne's fears and held her hand until deep cleansing sobs rose in her chest. She knew her faith was weak, but perhaps if she. let the language of God's love settle in her mind, it would be enough. When James |