In the Wilderness (25 page)

The distinction seemed of dubious credit, but I was secretly pleased to hear that my past reputation had preceded me. I had no desire, however, to be mistaken for a narc. Whether left over from my old self or ingrained in me by the code of family, one of the worst breeches of integrity anyone could make was to squeal, to rat, to be a toady. I went out of my way to assure the “rinks”—the dope smokers and neophyte hippies—that I was cool and would hold their confidence. My newfound jock friends were uneasy with my crossing over the clique lines, but they were aware that I had a mission: to recruit souls for Christ.

I invited my schoolmates to attend our youth meetings, led by a young minister and his wife who had about them an intriguing California aura. Reverend Dave, our youth pastor,
wore his hair a little too long, the elders felt, and he had a way of moving his shoulders and head while playing his guitar that made them nervous. His wife had a heavy hand with the mascara wand, the women whispered—a bit too much glitter. Still, all this might be forgiven in the face of the fact that more and more teenagers were being drawn to the church.

“Jesus freaks!” the heathens shouted at us as they drove by, music blaring. We ignored them, joining hands in the park and praying beneath the limbs of gnarled elms, secure in our sacred circle, calmed by our combined voices. I wasn’t alone anymore. Many of the popular kids from my school had heeded the call from the altar and joined me in the ranks of the born again. Bonnie was saved now, and Candy, Brent and Joe.

Together with Pastor Dave we started a call-in radio show, broadcast live from the studio of KRLC, the same station I had listened to all those long nights when my world was unraveling. We held the night spot from ten to eleven, catching the young crowd still tuned in by surprise. Between cuts of Christian rock (a new designation not all our congregation was comfortable with), we testified to the joy and love Christ had brought into our lives. When it was my turn at the mike, I spoke of my past.

“I know that there are those of you out there who are thinking, ‘I’m so alone, I’m so scared.’ You don’t need to be scared. You don’t need to be alone. You won’t find comfort in drugs or alcohol. I’ve been there. I know. Christ is the only answer. Ask Him into your heart tonight. I’ll pray with you.”

Everyone in the booth would bow their heads; even the disc jockey, looking bored and a little incredulous, would lower his eyes.

“Dear Lord, You see into the hearts of everyone. You can see, even if I can’t, the lost souls listening tonight. They need
You, Jesus. Touch them, Lord. Let them feel You come into their hearts. Let them know the joy of surrender, the joy of knowing You as their Savior. Let them be born again.”

As I prayed, Pastor Dave and the others joining in with their own urgings toward salvation, I marveled at how far I had come. To every thing there is a season, I thought. Only God could know the reason.

Pastor Dave believed that if you were going to take away the activities of the world, you had to fill the void with more righteous choices. Instead of going to the school proms, we had banquets catered by the church matrons. We attended dressed to the nines—long gowns and stylish tuxedos, hideously large corsages and miniature boutonnieres. We did everything we could to mimic the ways of our unsaved peers without compromising the state of our souls.

In the keepsake photographs taken by our own Christian cameraman, we look scrubbed and virginal, happy in our abstinence. But every time I hear a zealous politician or clergyman declaring the church a protector of chastity, I remember the common aftermath of any teenage social function I attended, whether blessed or unholy: a mad scramble in the backseats of the fathers’ Buicks or behind the church or in the closet where the choir robes hung down like a hundred satin wings. Even on the chaperoned bus trips to one Christian youth conference or another, straws were drawn to see who got first shot at the back, where lovers might pass their allotted ten minutes in seclusion behind the carefully draped garment bags and coats. The one difference between the manifestations of the hormonal ragings of those damned and those saved may be this: how deeply the afterglow is tinged with guilt.

What part of our trysting the attendant adults were privy to was met with punishment. For sneaking out of the girls’ dorm and knocking on the boys’ windows, we were made to spend the night not in our bunkbeds but on the cold seats of the bus, shivering without blankets or pillows. And then there was the “hot seat,” a wired metal stool the offender had to sit on to receive her “jolt” of discipline.

I sometimes regret those years in the church, filled with guilt and perhaps even abuse, yet given the choices in my own life, even considering the summer with the Langs, I feel lucky to have escaped the chasm that so many of my junior high school friends eventually fell into. The last time I saw Maria, the girl whose filthy upstairs bedroom seemed such a haven from the prison I believed my life had become, she was working as a carhop. I did not recognize her, but she did me. Her front teeth were gone, and one side of her face was grotesquely swollen. “The old man,” she said, shaking her head, dragging from her cigarette a final, sideways puff.

I never saw nor heard of Patti again but cannot imagine her life took any uphill turn. Of the others I was closest to, the ones with whom I chased the bums and smoked dope after school, the majority are dead, imprisoned or living with abuse. Larry died in the river, Dennis in a car wreck. The night Les and I were caught coming home from the party and made to lead our separate lives, those who had dropped us off robbed the corner store at gunpoint and were caught the next day. Most were sent to do time in juvenile detention, and I might easily have been one of them. I wonder if I could have faced the old storekeeper and his silver-haired wife, who had been so kind to me in the days when all I wanted from them was a few pieces of penny candy.

•   •   •

My father continued his night work, and my memories of him during those years are few. Only on Sundays did he seem part of the family. Other times, when my mother insisted that we ask for his approval of our activities, my brother and I waited for that window of opportunity to present itself: in the evening, when he rose from his bed and made his way to his chair, where, before leaving for the truck yard, he sat with his Bible and the plate of food my mother offered.

I seldom asked for privileges that might not be granted and knew well the boundaries of what events were considered acceptable. If I did question his decision, the reaction was immediate: there need be no reason but his word, and that word was no. I risked punishment if I opened my mouth again. I held my tongue but felt the resistance in me rise. In my room I would reach for my Bible and find the marked passage, Colossians 3:20: “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.” I closed my eyes and let the words settle into an intonation that separated me from the room, the house, the man in his chair whom I feared far too greatly to remind of the verse which followed: “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.” I could hardly allow myself to contemplate its directive, for to challenge my fathers knowledge of the Scripture, or to question his adherence to its dictates, would surely bring on his wrath.

My mother continued to rise before the rest of us, preparing our breakfast, packing our lunches, cleaning and ironing until she left for her shift at the grocery store. The cycle continued when she arrived home, when she fixed our meals and tended to the needs of her family.

Just as I had watched Sister Lang and Sarah, I now watched my mother, her seemingly perfect submissiveness, her quiet determination to keep peace and harmony between
us. But I also wondered what secrets my mother hid, what stories she carried as deeply as I carried my own. She never complained about her life, never spoke of her own desires or emotions—she seemed to have no passion or need, no past or present of her own. I came to believe what she projected. I believed she needed nothing but her home, her family and her god, and something in me loathed her for it.

Eating the biscuits and gravy, roast and potatoes, fried chicken, eating from the cleanest dishes, sitting in the room filled with the food smells of my mother’s cooking, I turned my back to her and ate what she gave. What I realize now is that what I wanted from her was not food or even harmony but a story, a narrative to give meaning to her life and mine. I needed my mother to tell me how to find happiness in submission, how to content myself with giving and serving and silence. If I could only find the secret—and surely she possessed such a secret—perhaps I too could be satisfied and happy.

I think back to my eighth-grade year, to that time just after I had run away from home. I had returned to school a hero, except to one girl, Lisa, who looked so much like me that the police had picked her up, thinking her the truant. In fact, she was skipping school but might have gone undetected had it not been for the bulletin put out on my account. It was my fault the cops had taken her in, my fault her father had whipped her.

She’d waited for me after school, and by the time I reached the corner where she and her friends gathered, I knew her intent. “She wants to beat you up,” they whispered excitedly. “She wants to whip your ass.”

I had no intention of having it out with Lisa, providing the
leering crowd with a “cat fight.” I crossed the street and kept on walking, only to have her follow me, throwing rocks at my back. Finally, I stopped and turned.

“I don’t want to fight, Lisa.”

“Chicken! Bitch!” The sides had been drawn, and I found myself being pushed toward her by the group at my back. Her supporters formed a wedge, and then we were a foot apart, circled by a loud and eager audience.

I was already in enough trouble. I didn’t need to be hauled into the principal’s office for this. I opened my mouth to say so, and she hit me. I staggered back. Arms caught me and stood me straight. I touched my lip and found blood.

There was something about seeing my hand glistening red that acted like a firing pin, sending me at the girl. I knocked her to the ground, pummeling her gut, twisting her hair in one hand to get at her face. By the time they pulled me off her, she was bleeding and retching onto the sidewalk. I wanted to kill her, and for years afterward the one confession I could always count on was my continuing desire to do so. I felt wild, unleashed, unable to control what had risen in me and exploded into fury. I jerked away from my friends, leaving them stunned and shuffling—half-ashamed at what they had seen—and walked home alone.

I hadn’t tried to hide my swollen lip and bloodstained face from my mother, who stood at the sink, scraping carrots.

“What in the world! What happened to you?”

I shook my head and sat down at the table. While she dabbed at my mouth, I explained, for once feeling no need to lie. What had I done to provoke this? Hadn’t I tried to avoid the fight? In her eyes I saw sympathy and anger. It was the most intimacy I had felt with my mother since I was a child.

When our eyes met, she pulled away. “You smell like an ashtray,” she said, regaining her composure, drifting back into
her controlled and authoritarian self. I shrugged. She knew I smoked. She smeared a bit of Vaseline on my cut, then resumed her place at the sink. There was a heaviness in her movement, a hint that something was working inside her, and I waited to see what would come of it. She ran her rag around the edge of a plate. “It’s my fault, you know.”

“What’s your fault? The fight?”

“No, your smoking. God’s punishing me through you.”

What was she talking about? I knew she had smoked before, during those years in the camps. But why would God punish her now?

“But you quit smoking.”

“No, I just told everybody I did. I lied.”

She told me how she sneaked drags off Dad’s cigarettes, plugging the crack at the bottom of the bathroom door with a towel. It was her secret sin—she was sure not even my father knew. And because it was secret—because she had allowed herself to believe that she could hide such a transgression from her husband and God—she was doomed to reap what she had sown: the proof sat before her, her own daughter bedraggled and bloodied like some barroom whore.

Would God lead me to sin, I wondered, in order to punish her, a woman who gave so much of herself there seemed nothing left but a shell? Even then, to think of her trying to hide, fearing the judgment of her family, made me want to reach out to her, rock in her arms and let her feel the kindred circle of mine, make her feel what connected us—something more than weakness and sin, something more than cigarettes: it was the overwhelming sense of guilt and despair brought on by our inability to see ourselves as worthy of love.

I did not realize then what bonds there were between us. Nor did I consider these things when I was living in her house as the good daughter, fighting the bitterness and disdain I felt
for her desire to please us. The struggle was constant: I knew I must subjugate myself, just as she did, to my father’s will, and then to the will of my husband; I also knew that I could no more imagine myself leading my mother’s life than I could imagine going against my father’s authority. Perhaps, just as my father had sacrificed his desire for the woods in order to take up his duty to God, I must give up my desire to control my own life. I must remember the cause of the Fall of Man; I must remember the perverse desire of Eve. I must learn to submit to my duty as a woman, don the veil of my sex, follow the teachings of Paul: “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of woman is the man. The woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” If I wanted to honor my family and my God by attracting a righteous man to wed, I must remember.

I must remember how deep and insidious was the nature of my weakness.

The fall after I returned from the Langs I began dating Tom, a young man from church. His initial courtship filled my need to be loved and desired, and I found myself calculating my every action in order to gain his admiration. Our need to spend every waking hour together wore at my mother’s patience and my father’s stony authority. What I know now they undoubtedly saw then: Tom was proprietary, jealous beyond reason. He guarded my every move, chose my wardrobe, flew into rages if he found me talking to another boy, whether friend or suitor. When I was invited to a pool party at the house of a church member (the Assembly of God allowed swimsuits covered by long T-shirts for girls taking part in mixed swimming), he ranted over the phone at me: he had to
work and I couldn’t go without him. It was improper. The other boys would see my body,
his
girlfriend’s body, and I’d be responsible for their lust. Was that what I wanted? Did I want them to look at me, to want to have sex with me? That was it, wasn’t it? I was a prick-tease, a loose, two-timing prick-tease.