In the Wilderness (11 page)

Lola Johnson and her husband, Pete, lived in the Circle. They had attended Cardiff Spur Mission for years, and they themselves were active missionaries: whale baleen and ivory decorated their walls and shelves. Their house, with its second story and separate dining room, seemed enormous, populated by four boys and one girl, Cynthia, whose room I longed to lounge in and never leave—pink everything, ruffles everywhere, wallpaper with the tiniest rosebuds I had ever seen. Even the sun slanting in through her dormer window, filtered through lace, softened to a delicate and powdery light.

Before the Langs came to Cardiff and my parents began spending more and more evenings at their table, we had spent a great deal of time with the Johnsons: late-night sledding parties, taffy pulls, dinners of exotic dishes Lola had learned to cook from one native tribe or another. Cumin and curry wafted from her kitchen, and I thought I had never inhaled anything so foreign and rich, as though a hole had been dug in the earth, releasing secret and mysterious smells.

I remember their easy laughter and their patience with me when I asked to set to ticking the only metronome I had seen in my life. I remember afternoons when my mother and Lola drank coffee at our kitchen table, leaning into their whispered conversation with the intensity of message bearers. And I remember my mother, many months later, standing at the sink, crying as she read the letter Lola had sent—an explanation maybe, perhaps a plea for my mothers intervention, but nothing I can imagine now as a confession.

From the beginning, Lola had voiced her disapproval of the Langs’ ministry, casting one of the few votes against their
bid for pastorship. After their arrival she continued to play the organ during service as she had always done, but now Sister Lang had a place at the piano, playing with modest composure the unembellished chords she had taught herself. Lola, a teacher of music, made the organ an instrument of exuberant praise.

I see now how she brought judgment upon herself. She prayed louder than most men, twirling in the aisle until the long fall of her auburn hair loosened from its bun and flowed around her shoulders. Sister Lang said once she had seen her at revival dance out of the sanctuary and into the foyer. “I peeked around the corner,” she told us, “and there she was, smoothing her hair and checking her teeth. Then here she came back out, singing and swaying. She thinks she’s got us all fooled, but she ain’t fooling nobody.” I remembered all the times I had heard Lola sing in the Spirit and prophesy in tongues. Even in shapeless skirts and high-necked blouses, there was something unfettered about her, something beautiful. Maybe it was this that caused Brother Lang to dream.

I sat one night in the parsonage kitchen with my parents, listening transfixed as he told of his vision: a chipmunk with eyes like obsidian rode his shoulders, whispering in his ear an evil seduction. He said that each time he reached to pull the harmless animal from his neck, it would turn into a lion. In fear, he would release his hold, and the demon would resume its original form.

He mimicked the motions, grabbing the air behind him as though dragging the thing from his neck, his eyes widening in surprised horror as he described the lion’s foul breath and glistening fangs. We felt its weight on our own shoulders as he hunched in his chair, breathed out our own relieved sighs when the monster metamorphosed back into its small squirrel body.

Finally, he straightened and opened the Bible he held in his lap, one finger marking the chosen passage:

Brother Lang said that God had revealed to him the dream and its meaning: the monster was Lola, full of deceit and cunning, revealing her true nature when threatened—she was predatory, destroying the church with false witness. To drive her from our midst would require great prayer and sacrifice: only the purest spirit could hope to face such a demon without losing his own soul to Satan.

The Devil walked among us cloaked in good deeds, a devil who could quote Scripture and pray in the tongues of angels. Wasn’t Satan, after all, once an angel Himself? Brother Lang said we must purge ourselves in order to see the enemy’s true form. He said he would take the burden upon himself so that God might enlighten us all. The next Sunday, he would begin his fast, forty days and forty nights, following the example set by Christ to purify his body before crucifixion.

Each of us had fasted for shorter periods but none could remember when a leader or member had taken on such a trial. When he asked that we gather around him to pray for
strength, for God to accept his sacrifice, we reached out our hands, humbled by his willingness to suffer such pain on our behalf.

Over the next few weeks, we watched Brother Lang take on the carriage of an old man. His wide, ruddy face yellowed and shrank; the skin of his forehead tightened across his skull. The belt cinching his waist became riddled with newly punched holes, and his suitcoat hung from the bones of his shoulders as though still on its hanger. We held our breath as his sons helped him from his chair to the podium, where he tottered drunkenly, lisping out God’s promise of retribution.

As we lifted our voices in prayer, I opened my eyes just enough to see the faces of those around me, and I knew they were wondering, Who? Who walks among us disguised as one of God’s own? I dared not look at Lola, who lifted her voice highest of all, calling on Jesus to open our eyes so that we might see the true nature of the devils who deceived us.

Perhaps Lola knew all along that the preacher’s words were directed at her. As the knowledge of his intent spread, the church divided, a few believing their pastor’s words less Gospel than the rantings of a jealous man, but most caught up in the fever of his convictions. He stood before us, willing to die in his quest for truth, while Lola continued to dance, whirling from pew to pew, singing out God’s praises.

Finally, the family was shunned. Cynthia and her brothers, whose eyes no one could meet, filed that last time from the church, following the march of their mother, their father, a tall, handsome man, who rose last, wanting more than anything to fight it out, to grab the skinny man from his shoes and shake him till his bones rattled. No one turned to meet his challenge, offering only their bowed heads in compensation. Brother Lang sat weak and smug, shriveled to a hard, leathery knot.

I think of that letter my mother held in her damp hands as she leaned against the counter, letting the hot water run and drain until steam rose from the scalded dishes. It was written by a woman who, like herself, had been given the command to serve and obey. And like her, even covered and unadorned, the woman was lovely.

Did my mother wonder why Lola did not give in, why she did not submit and allow whatever possessed her to be exorcised, cast out by the elders, by the preacher whose hands trembled to touch her? What secrets had they whispered across the table while we went about our play, children oblivious to our mothers’ lives, their desires, their unnamed temptations?

This was my mother’s lesson, and my own, a lesson I have not yet unlearned: be still, be invisible. Do not draw attention to yourself, for in doing so you become a target. I would learn that unholy men will rape you. Men of God will leave their meditations and good wives to lust after you. Satan himself will see you flashing, drawn like a fish to a vulgar lure, and take your soul for his own. Even then, before I knew what awaited me in the world outside our circle, I felt the threat that I as a woman was to myself and those around me. We were weak, unpredictable, no more capable of controlling our whims and desires than Eve, whose very nature caused the fall of Man, was able to control her gross appetite.

I became determined to deny myself any pleasure. I fasted for days to rid my soul of whatever evil I carried inside me, even those evils of which I was unaware. I stayed with the adults in the kitchen after service, avoiding Luke’s eyes, praying into my hot cocoa when I saw him disappear toward the stairs. Women, I knew, were responsible for every temptation. If Luke sinned, if he touched my knee or brushed his arm against my breast, judgment would fall on me.

•   •   •

I loved the time I spent with Sister Lang and Sarah, perhaps believing that my kinship with women would be what would save me. I imitated their modest gestures, combed my hair and curled it just as they did, sat next to them at the table and filed my nails into blunt rectangles instead of the smooth ovals my mother preferred. Often, they took me to town with them—into Pierce with its sidewalks and American flag flapping above the new post office. They’d let me stop at the library, window-shop at Kimball’s Drug, buy me a cone at the Confectionery. The Confectionery seemed a rarity: soda fountain, booths and tables, a jukebox against the back wall, around which the high school kids congregated afternoons and weekends. Sometimes we lingered long enough over phosphates for me to catch a chorus of “Cherry Hill Park” or Elvis’s deep voice lamenting,
If there’s one thing that she don’t need it’s another little child and a mouth to feed in the ghetto
. I had never heard of a ghetto and could not imagine any mother mourning the birth of her baby, but I understood it was all very tragic. The songs left me feeling touched by something outside, real: there were places where people led lives of ongoing drama and magnificent despair while I raced the boys at recess for the one unbroken swing.

During one outing, while Sarah shopped for material at Durant’s, Sister Lang called me to a display against the wall.

“You don’t have any nylons, do you?”

I shook my head, feeling both childish for having to say no and excited by her interest. She held up a pair of tights the color of sand, nearly opaque.

“I bet your mother won’t care.”

I looked doubtful. She might not care but my father would, and she would not risk his disapproval.

Sister Lang placed them on the counter with her other purchases. I had never received such a gift, a gift made even more special by its provocative and conspiratorial nature; girls wore kneesocks because their legs had little value beyond simple locomotion, unlike the legs of women, whose shape and composure elicited considerable attention—why else were they so careful to wear their skirts covering their knees? It was permissible for a woman to show a certain portion of her body—the shins—as long as she did so with modesty. Too much revealed led men to imagine more.

Sister Langs instigation meant she saw me as more than a child, and I clutched the small package to my chest as we drove home. I could not wait for Sunday, for Luke to see me in this new way. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice, although he seldom missed scrutinizing my dress and demeanor. Still, there was my mother, whom Sister Lang had made to seem different somehow, on my side. I felt how the circle could split like the cells we studied in school—a line through the middle like a stricture between the women and the men—and I felt newly joined to the lives of my mother, Sister Lang and Sarah. There was some power they had that I sensed more than understood.

It confused me, seeing them without their husbands and still able to find their way in the world, making decisions as though the men did not exist. I thought of the night when Brother Lang had pulled his wife onto his lap and she whispered something in his ear that made him blush and squirm. Then, when she rose laughing, he watched her walk into the kitchen as though no one else in that room existed. What had she said to him? Whatever it was, it took him a moment to come back to his Bible, which had slipped between his knee and the chair cushion.

•   •   •

When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom, stripped off my kneesocks and pulled the silky tights over my pointed toes and up over my thighs. I bunched my dress at my waist and turned in front of the mirror, trying to make familiar the body in the glass. From the hips down, I looked like a woman, but above the gathered material I seemed still a child. My hair hung limp and stringy. My glasses slipped down my nose so that to look through them I cocked my head back, letting my mouth slack open. I dropped my dress and began brushing my hair furiously. One hundred strokes, day and night, Sarah said. Mayonnaise wash and vinegar rinse to make it shine. Someone knocked.

“Kim, what are you doing in there? Come on out, now. Greg needs someone to play with.”

I scowled at my mother through the door. I waited until I heard her step back into the kitchen, then gently pulled off the nylons, one leg at a time. The hair on my shins lifted with static. I had asked to be allowed to shave my legs, but my father said no. “Maybe when you’re thirteen,” my mother had said. She knew the boys at school teased me about the dark down. At least the nylons were heavy enough to hide the hair until my father gave his permission for it to be removed.

I stepped into the kitchen, where my brother waited. “Wanna go outside, Sis?”

I looked from him to my mother. No, I didn’t want to go outside. I wanted to stay in and wash my hair in eggs and honey, rub lemons on my knees to erase the rough skin, just like it said in
Ladies’ Home Journal
. My mother dipped her head toward the door. “Go out for a little while, just until dinner. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Outside, the late afternoon air made me wish I’d pulled on pants beneath my dress. Ice on the eaves glistened, catching the last sparks of sun. I refused to talk to Greg and began trudging in circles, kicking aside moss and pine needles, scuffing lines into the damp ground. I took my time, working my feet close, until the letters looked perfect, joined by a cursive flourish—“LL+KB.” Greg watched from a distance. There was something different about me he wasn’t sure of, something secret. Instead of a playmate I’d become an adversary. When he edged toward me, I shuffled and kicked through the lines before he could see what I’d written.