A Temple of the Holy Ghost

North Georgia, early 1950s. A Temple of the Holy Ghost tells of the weekend visit of two fourteen-year-old girls, Susan and Joanne, to the home of their cousin, a twelve-year-old named Darcie Crandall. Susan and Joanne attend a Catholic convent school in Maysville, but are mostly interested only in boys and clothes. Still, the nuns there have taught them to regard their bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost, as the Bible says, so when the girls arrive at the Crandalls’ in Alpharetta, they identify themselves (somewhat comically) as Temple One and Temple Two. Darcie’s mother wants to arrange something for her guests to do on Saturday night, and ultimately she settles on a date with a pair of sixteen-year-old twins, Protestant preachers-in-training named Wendell and Cory Wilkins. Susan and Joanne have dinner with the boys at the Crandall home, and then Wendell and Cory take their dates to the local fair. When the girls return that night, they tell Darcie about a hermaphrodite they saw who was presented onstage as a freak. The hermaphrodite, however, explained (in all seriousness) that this was how God made it—as its own temple of the Holy Ghost. The next afternoon, a Sunday, Mrs. Crandall and Darcie drive the girls back to the convent school, and they all attend a Catholic Mass in the chapel with the nuns (even though the Crandalls are Protestant). Darcie seems moved by what she has witnessed there—of temples, “ghosts,” and the Holy Host—and the twelve-year-old muses on the experience as she returns home to Alpharetta with her mother.