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R E B E C C A M C C L A N A H A N Passion Week, 1966 In the sanctuary of fundamental no’s, so much was not allowed. What was left pressed hard to free itself, the way even a modest breast, laced into a bustier, surprises with dollops of flesh. It was the week of Christ’s suffering and release. A ceiling fan paddled the heat as voices of boys in the pew behind me wandered the lower octaves. One tenor had legs so long he could stretch his feet to mine, which slipped out of white pumps at first touch and stayed through hymns and prayers and the miracle of bread into flesh. The altar portrait was a savage Jesuswilderness hair and shoulders bare and muscled, the kind of body God the Father might have kneaded from clay. Parents nodded in their accustomed pews while those of us cast in new bodies leaned into the story of the son’s earthly side, the women The 1990s ❚ 207 who loved him. His mother, of course. The sisters of Lazarus. The whore who anointed his feet with kisses and tears, dried them with her hair and rubbed oils that might have been sold, the disciples said, to feed the poor. And Christ, dusty and tired and not long for this world, rebuked her rebukers, claiming a higher charity and suffering the woman to do it. 208 ❚ The 1990s ...

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