sunday best [Mary & Maggie | Blitz]

magdalena clark

---

Maggie's day follows the rhythms of every other day; in fact, they overlap in her mind, stacked up like a deck of cards. She kneels at her bedside and makes promises to God she cannot keep.¹ Breakfast is usually cold porridge, made by Imelda hours before, congealed in the pan. She tops it with stewed fruit from their preserves. She likes plum best.² She follows her lists, as best she can, and resists, so far as is possible, the pleas of her sister and mother for her assistance. Instead she must brush her hair, over and over again, muttering bible verses beneath her breath.

Then, she slips outside.³ Today in particular, it is bright, and she winces into the glare. For weeks, it has been overcast, and Maggie has become accustomed to the perpetual gloom. Her sister, at least, will be glad of the emergence of sunlight.⁴ Even Maggie comes to appreciate it after she has sat for a while in her favourite tree, allowing the warmth of it to sink into the bare skin of her arms. The church is cold and draughty all year round; there is no reprieve from the chill, when you are encased within a great chamber of bare stone. It is what she has grown up with, and sometimes she finds anything else unnerving, as if she risks her blood turning warm. 

She is there when she notices the girl. Maggie does not recognise her, but she rarely leaves the Churchyard, not even to go to market with Imedla, not since father died, so this does not surprise her. It is not often that strangers come by the Church.⁵ ur She did not notice Maggie until she was much closer; instead, her eyes were fixed on the building itself. When finally she noticed her there, she did not startle, as Maggie thought she might, but rather smiled warmly at her. Maggie took a hasty step back.

"It's a beautiful building, don't you think?" said the girl, looking up at the building in awe. Despite herself, something inside of Maggie swelled with pride - after all, those grey stone walls had nursed her in the cradle, and had allowed God to stroke her hair as she slept every night.⁶

"Can't you imagine how grand it must once have been?" 

This turn of phrase caused something within Maggie to wither up and perish. For a moment she was silent, unsure what to say, and then she flushed with violent embarrassment, which turned to fierce indignation. How dare this stranger come to her home and point out its faults? To suggest that once it had been grand?⁷ 

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," she said, haughtily. She considered for a moment and then added, "Why are you here, anyway?" 

Imelda called it tactless, but Maggie preferred to think of it as direct. 

---

1. She promises she will do better, that she will be kinder, that she will not sin, that she will follow the rules, that she will obey, that she will do her father's memory proud. 
2. Maggie likes the top of the jar best, and is regularly scolded for opening a new jar without finishing the last one. 
3. Mother shouts after her, begging her not to dirty her skirts or ladder her stockings, because she has already mended them, but Maggie dislikes this sort of conversation and does not grace her with a response. Later, she prays for forgiveness, for in truth it is not right to disobey ones mother, especially when one has no father to look to instead. 
4. Too much water wrecks the crop, drowns it, and turns the fruit to sludge. 
5. When father was alive, it had been different, but once he was gone the visitors settled for leaving casserole, and once the casserole was eaten they stopped passing by at all. Maggie preferred it that way. 
6. Here, too, her father had died and her mother had beaten her and her sister had poisoned the mice, but Maggie supposed that just like people, a building cannot be made up of only good things. 
7. The stranger, of course, was right. The Church had crumbled since her father had died, falling into a state of disrepair they could not keep up with. Admitting this, though, was admitting that they were not managing without him, and this was something Maggie could not manage. 

magdalena clark

---

The girl seems surprised by Maggie's reaction; it occurs to Maggie that she did not realise that the Church belonged to her, instead had believed it to be some kind of crippled relic of a former time; empty, uninhabited, a victim of rot and decay. She frowns at the girl, noticing for the first time the careful way she has arranged herself; not a strand of hair out of place, her full lips painted with a steady hand. Maggie crosses her arms to hide the state of her own clothes, which have been mended and reworn over and over.¹

"Oh, I just love the idea of the place, is all," the girl says, backpedalling frantically. Maggie frowns at her, undecided as to whether or not she is forgiven. "Do you live here? On the grounds? Is this your orchard?" 

Maggie's first impulse is to tell her nothing, to turn away from her and run back to the safety of the Church, but she plants her feet and stands her ground. The girl seems harmless, if somewhat indelicate. After all, it is godly to be kind to thy neighbour, however nosy thy neighbour may be. As Maggie has some making up to do with God due to an unfortunate incident involving her mother's best pair of leather shoes², she decides she must stay. 

"We live in the Church," Maggie explains, warily. "This is our orchard. People don't usually come here." 

In her head she hears her mother's voice, scolding her. You're always so rude, Magdalena. You must be nicer. 

Maggie has never spent any time around children her own age, and she is not sure exactly what to say to achieve this, but she tries her very best. "Would you like an apple?"³

---

1. The dress had belonged to Imedla before her, and her mother before that; it was patched and darned and dyed to cover the stains. 
2. It was an accident. 
3. It may be difficult to find an apple that has not been gnawed at by the birds, but in her best attempt at hospitality, Maggie is willing to look. 

magdalena clark

---

The girl apologies profusely, hands up, proclaiming her innocence. "Oh, my goodness, I'm so dreadfully sorry, I just-" With this, Maggie was satisfied. God instructs us to forgive, and forgive Maggie shall - the stranger repents so bashfully that Maggie, too, is embarrassed.¹

She is surprised, too, when the girl accepts her offer of the apple gleefully. She does not seem suspicious, does not appear to fear poison, as Maggie would, but graciously assents, if it's not too much trouble. 

"What kind of apples do you have, if I may ask?" Maggie doesn't quite understand the point of the dependent clause - what is the point, she wonders, of asking if she may ask, when in fact she has already asks? People from outside always confuse her, they talk in convoluted riddles full of secret messages, but nobody has bothered to teach Maggie the code. 

Imelda would know what kind of apples. After all, she planted them, painstakingly, read carefully which seeds to use and how best to care for them.² Maggie looks at the intruder, perplexed. "We have red apples and green apples. But the ones in this tree are green." 

Keen to get away, Maggie reaches up for a branch and kicks off the trunk, finding a foothold and then another until she is up in the air.³ She can breathe easier, once she is off the ground, away from the girl. She searches the branches for a good one - one with no bruises or bite marks - selects one and plucks it from the tree. She won't tell Imelda, who frets too much about having enough left to sell at market. Maggie swings down and lands lightly, with her knees braced. She tosses the apple to the girl. 

"Did you get lost?" she asks, "Or did you come here on purpose?" Suddenly, another thought strikes her, and she narrows her eyes. "Are you trying to sell us something? We won't buy it, I'm afraid. We don't have a lot of money."⁴

---

1. Maggie herself isn't really one for apologies. She is no stranger to guilt, of course, but moulding and shaping that into something worth handing back to the person she has wronged is generally more than she can stomach, and she makes it up to them in other ways: she prays for them, she cuts flowers and presses them between the pages of old books and scatters them in their beds, she serves them the best slice of pie at tea. Her apologies are heartfelt, but ultimately silent. 
2. The apples are granny smiths and ambrosias. Down the back there is a line of bravos, too, but they aren't growing well and the fruit has mostly rotted. 
3. This particular tree is one of her favourites; there is a good spot where she can wedge herself between the trunk and a thick branch and read her book.
4. The truth is, they don't have any money, but mother would tear her hair out if she told somebody that, so she settles on a half-truth.

magdalena clark

---

Maggie examined the flush on the intruder's cheeks curiously; they looked at one another for a moment, neither of one them quite able to figure the other one out. 

"Goodness, no," the girl cried, turning redder still¹ "honest!" 

It was not clear to Maggie why, exactly, the girl was offended - she seemed quite shaken by the suggestion that she might be selling something.² Maggie was just about to ask her what she meant, however she did not pause, and instead continued on, "I was just walking by and the marvellous church caught my eye, is all. I'm on my way to meet someone, you see." 

Maggie wondered where she was, what kind of places people went in order to meet people they knew. All of the people Maggie knew, really, were inside her house right now, likely scrubbing the floors or washing the curtains or turning the fresh harvest into jam. Outside, there were only strangers- she had kept in touch with nobody from when she had gone to school, before her father had died.³

"-a real special someone," the girl added. As she said this, her voice changed peculiarly, as if her mouth was full of sugar. Maggie found herself drawing a little closer to her. "I don't mean to be a bother. I can leave if I'm causing you any trouble." 

"No!" Maggie said, a little too urgently. She tried again, more subdued. "No. Please. Stay. Tell me about the someone, if you will." 

It was only then that she remembered her very best manners, impressed ineffectually into her by her mother and sister. "My name is Magdalena, but my friends call me Maggie."⁴

---

1. Maggie noted approvingly that she does not say: God, but instead, Goodness - for this is certainly on the list of things that a respectable girl should do. 
2. Maggie lives exclusively on the pennies her sister makes selling their fruit at the market. Imelda protects her from most things; she does not know that people would scorn such an existence. 
3. Even back then, Maggie had been strange; obsessive, unnaturally invested in the sort of things other little girls weren't. People did not warm to her easily. Even as a baby, she had not drawn the usual coos and gushes of affection from strangers that most children did. 
4. This is a lie: Maggie's only friends are the mice, and they call her nothing at all. 

magdalena clark

---

"Oh, how splendid!" the girl cries, flushed and beaming. Maggie wonders which one of them is strange; she has certainly never heard someone who speaks the way the stranger does, in carefully selected, almost stilted language. She sounds like a character in one of the dusty old novels that rot slowly in the Church cellar.¹  "Thank you ever so kindly," she goes on, in her shrill, storybook cadence. Maggie wonders if she has made a mistake with her encouragement, if it is too late to slip away. 

"I'd be delighted to tell you all about him!" Certainly, she lights up at even the thought of him. Maggie wonders whether it can really be a good thing, to be gripped so firmly by love, as nice as it seems to be. It strikes her as a vulnerability, an underlying, dangerous sort of insanity, that might rob a person of their usual strength and resolve.²  

She called Maggie's name beautiful. She seemed enchanted by everything, thoroughly delighted by each new step forward. Maggie found it unsettling; she preferred to move cautiously, take her time in deciding whether something unfamiliar belonged on the 'good' or 'bad' list.³ She introduced herself, then, as Mary. Not the sort of name you heard often, these days, but it was biblical, Maggie noted, which surely counted for something. 

Mary tells Maggie the story, then, and Maggie listens carefully, with her brow furrowed. The tale is familiar, is just like the boring paperbacks - featuring gentleman and promises of forever and ever. It all sounds a little fanciful to Maggie. She thinks of the boys her age she knew, back when she went to school. They picked their noses, she remembered, and jostled and swore and thought girls were gross.⁴ Something must have changed in the time since Maggie's father had died and everything had changed - those boys must have hatched from their ugly cocoons and transformed into these fabled gentlemen, if Mary was to be believed. Maggie finds this wholly unlikely. 

"What about you? Is there a special someone in your life?" Mary asks, and Maggie blushes bright red. It has been years since she has even spoken to a boy, and the idea repulses her, makes her toes curl up in her shoes. Now that she thinks about it, she should probably add 'talking to boys' to the bad list, just in case. 

"You seem young, to get married," Maggie says, bluntly. "Why such a rush?" 

Deliberately, she ignores the query into her own love life, and averts her eyes to avoid confronting it. Surreptitiously, Maggie steals a glance back over her shoulder towards the Church, half-hoping that her sister or mother might be on their way to fetch her and drag her to her chores, in order to save her from this question of grown-upness.⁵

---

1. Maggie has flipped through them once or twice, but grew quickly bored by the incessant discussion of marriage. 
2. She wonders if Mother and Father were ever in that sort of love. By the time Maggie had been born, their marriage was the gritty, enduring sort of love that has survived hardship. They depended on each other, certainly, but Maggie never saw any evidence of romance between them.
3. By default, almost everything she didn't know ended up on the 'bad' list. 
4. This opinion was not one-sided. 
5. If there is one thing Maggie fears more than anything else, it is becoming grown, and feeling the expectations of the world fall down on her narrow shoulders.