Loud in the House of Myself (4 page)

WHEN HANNAH AITCHISON
tattooed Eve (of Garden of Eden fame) from my left ribs down to my hip bone, I felt somewhat blasphemous, like I was doing something I had been warned a long time ago would send me to hell. After all, she’s naked, though her naughty bits are covered by the snake that twists around her, holding an apple in its mouth. I’ve blocked a lot of the Bible from my brain, because for so long it was used primarily to scare me. But Eve was a woman who wanted what she shouldn’t, and for that reason, she has always been my favorite character in the Bible. Eve took chances. She was the first woman to buck the system, to realize that beauty carries risk but is worth it nonetheless. As the story goes, Eve was responsible for the whole of human suffering, but without her sacrifice, I wouldn’t know the flavor of pink cotton candy, wouldn’t know my cat smells like melted snow, wouldn’t have started getting tattooed. Because what is a tattoo, really, but suffering that brings with it beauty?

I remember the night of my first barbecue with the Baptist church’s youth group as Act One of a protracted sexual awakening that took place during the summer and fall of 1984. I was invited to the cookout by a geeky boy named Brian, the type who plays in the band and would be a Dungeons & Dragons freak if it weren’t a sin against Jesus. Although I considered myself a devout servant of Christ, I was still somehow able to overlook the fact that lusting after a married man was a sin, and became possessed by a fervent desire to fuck my youth group leader.

His name was Michael, and he was a cross between Max Headroom and Adonis. He had hulking muscles and hulking teeth, and he was playing volleyball when I first laid eyes on him. The whole scene is, of course, speckled in my mind with flakes of sunlit Coppertone gold, like the bright pops at the end of a Super 8 movie. I actually remember thinking,
My loins are aflame,
a phrase I had read or heard somewhere that seemed appropriate in the moment. I thanked Jesus. I prayed for two things: the will to starve, and Michael’s love.

By this point I had become the quintessential unpopular adolescent. Although I wasn’t quite as much of an outcast as the kids who didn’t bathe or the ones who had already started to smoke, I was still a compulsive reader and I sucked at sports. Therefore, even if I hadn’t had premature acne, my popularity still would have had a ceiling. As far as religion itself, I had never known anything outside of fundamentalist Christianity. Freedom of worship in Prairie Grove meant a choice between First Baptist, First Methodist, First Presbyterian, and the Church of Christ. Each church had its own reputation: the old people went to Methodist, the rednecks went to Presbyterian, and the Holy Rollers went to the Church of Christ, where they spoke in tongues and the girls couldn’t cut their hair or wear pants (meaning that as soon as they got to school, they changed into the tight, slutty jeans they had hidden in their lockers and headed straight for the bathroom to trowel on their makeup). The First Baptist church had a reputation as having the most active youth group, Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, and weekly cookouts—all of which appealed to me.

At the barbecue where I fell for Michael we ate hamburgers, played volleyball, and then went into the dimly lit air-conditioned church to watch a film about rock ’n’ roll records and how they were tools of the devil. Christian teenagers were shown gleefully flinging albums onto a fire in a trash can, and as the albums began to pile up, the camera began to zoom in, until the entire screen was filled with melting albums and flames. Some of the albums, said the voice-over, even
screamed,
they were so packed with evil. Then a picture of Satan’s face faded in from the background. The narrator talked about all the secular means by which teens could be led astray from Christ, with music being, apparently, one of the devil’s favorite weapons. The bad production values and garish film stock made me feel kind of sick to my stomach, so I watched Michael instead. He was about twenty-five, and he was married. His blond wife Pauline sat next to him, and when they bowed their heads to pray, she stroked his back gently, lovingly, and I imagined both her arms around him, and they were making out, naked, and
ohhh
…

I started going to church all the time. I tried to dress sexy when I went, or like a wholesome Christian version of sexy. I never got it quite right. I had already made some early stabs at New Wave clothing purchases, so I’d walk in wearing a black-and-white-striped miniskirt and pink leggings with dress shoes and a bow in my hair. But because I had tried to cut my hair like Cyndi Lauper, shaving one side and perming the other, it meant that for several months my head looked like an unfortunate prom dress. Still, I continued my zealous march through the doors of the Baptist church on a weekly basis, clutching my New International Version Student Bible and trying to win Michael’s favor. I just adored him. I thought it was so cute when he said, “Jammin’ for Jesus,” his frequent expression of enthusiasm for every situation from revival to a volleyball goal.

He said it after baptizing me in the human-size fish tank above the pulpit. My body, wrapped in a drenched white robe, was visible to the entire congregation through the Plexiglas window of the baptistery. Before Michael baptized me that night, I prayed hard for salvation from myself, begging Jesus to make me someone other, someone better, than I was. I wanted to be Pauline with her mascaraed eyelashes, her slightly overlapping front teeth, her scent of Pantene. I wanted her to crawl into the tank with me and scrub me clean with Procter & Gamble products, harsh abrasives, whatever would take away the invisible sin of the Bad Dog that made my mother ignore me and made my father fly into rages. I wanted to carry the sins of my family, the things we couldn’t talk about in public, into that fake rectangular sea and pay for them with my breath and my blood and my heart. I stared through the water at the warbly wood paneling above me, knowing I could come up whenever I wanted, but in making extra sure I’d atoned, I drew out my time underwater just a moment too long. Michael’s strong hands suddenly clenched my arms and brought me up for air.

Even after my baptism, I knew there was still something wrong with my head, but I trusted in God to fix it. I made regular trips to Michael’s office to confess my mundane junior high sins. I admitted that I sometimes cheated on tests and made my parents mad at me and that most people hated me but I didn’t know why.

He said, “It sounds like you feel you don’t fit in very well.”

I said, “That’s right, I don’t.”

“There are a lot of pressures at school when you’re different,” said Michael.

I stared at his teeth.

“Christ was different too,” he continued. “But now that you’ve joined the church, you have your brothers and sisters in Jesus to help you walk with Him.”

“I’ve been thinking about giving you my records,” I said, surprising myself. “I think maybe part of the reason I’m so sad sometimes is that I’m receiving those messages from Satan. Like in the backwards masking and stuff. Where they tell you to worship the devil.”

Michael nodded solemnly.

“So, yeah. I thought that maybe if I gave my records to you, just to keep for a little while, that maybe I could find some, uh, more strength in Christ.”

“Let’s pray about it,” Michael said, taking my hands. Four hundred billion volts shot through me.

The next Sunday, after church, I went to his office and pulled my records from my backpack. I had squeezed my eyes shut, gone on my knees in the dark, and prayed about this offering. I had held my breath and listened for Jesus to talk to me until I was almost sure I heard Him. I relished the chance to tell Michael how Jesus had said to me,
Yes, the Go-Gos are secular, and if you turn over that copy of “We Got the Beat,” you and I can speed up a little in our walk
. It pained me to give away my music, as it was the one thing prior to Jesus that had sometimes calmed me. I chose it largely for the rhythms of the lyrics, often replaying one segment of a song over and over again like a chant to soothe me. But I couldn’t back out now, and nothing seemed as important as the possibility that Michael might touch me again.

I leaned toward him, there, in his office, where icicles cracked inside the air conditioner and the indoor-outdoor carpet smelled of mold, and I said, “I feel like I’m really beginning to
understand
.”

“Jammin’,” he said. And he was so sincere, and his teeth were so white, and I closed my eyes and imagined that there were scratches on his back from last night with Pauline, and for one one-zillionth of a second I thought he might kiss me.

But he didn’t.

When I found out that church camp was coming up, I begged my mother to let me go. Thrilled at the prospect of my having any friends at all, even if said friends spent all their time jammin’ for the Messiah, she gave me the registration fee and money for snacks, and mined a pair of flowery twin-size sheets from the depths of the bathroom closet for my bunk bed. I couldn’t have been more thrilled: I was going to spend a week with Michael in a town called Bogg Springs, a place I imagined would be something of a Christian honeymoon resort.

Of course, as in most things, I was profoundly wrong. I arrived to find that the cabins were made of damp dark wood, with cracked concrete floors and only one window apiece. The bunk beds had microscopically thin, lumpy mattresses. I decided it would be an adventure sleeping up high in the air; I had never slept in a bunk bed. But I was assigned a bottom bunk beneath Darlene, one of the more pious Baptist girls, who wouldn’t wear the jeans that were so popular that year, the ones with the flat triangular yoke in front, because they pointed to your crotch and made boys think of sex. To my left was Pauline, Wife of Michael, and I couldn’t wait to watch her sleep at night and pretend I was Michael beside her. I could play the twisted, transubstantiationalist spy game at which I was already becoming adept, feeding my obsession with the sounds Pauline made in the night. I could learn the private things Michael knew.

The first night, there was a campfire, and while we were supposed to be praying around it I studied Michael through slit eyes instead. We were all holding hands, palms clasped, but Michael and Pauline’s fingers were intertwined. They did that sexy kind of hand-holding that involves all the fingers. I felt a great warmth that didn’t come from the fire and a sudden and overwhelming desire to have Michael’s tongue in my mouth. The thought of French-kissing Michael seeped into my prayers:
PleaseJesusjustoncepleaseJesus
. I was filled with guilt and weak with desire.

Somebody started a song:

I loved this song. Michael sang it sometimes. The part about “once you’ve experienced it” was my favorite, because it sounded so coming-of-age, like a tampon commercial. There was something about singing it around a fire that was entirely too much. It was so sexy, and it made me feel like such a
teenager
.

And in that moment I felt almost calm, like maybe all I needed to make my thoughts slow down was the right man. This was a delusion that would affect my choices far into adulthood, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought that someday, if I was good enough, if I was a good enough Christian, I could find a man like Michael, who would pull me close next to the fire and nestle his lips against my ear as he sang erotic Christian songs. Truth be told, I was having a little trouble differentiating between Michael and Christ Himself.

On my second day at camp, I became determined to save a soul, because I knew it was the thing that would make Michael proudest of me, and that when I told him what I’d done and we were rejoicing, he’d probably hug me, and I’d get to feel his strong arms around me and his breath in my hair. The opportunity to have one’s soul saved occurred nightly as part of the scheduled activities, so I had to scout around for someone who was holding out, just waiting for me to be the link between them and the Messiah. So that evening, when we sat in assembly in the main hall watching films and singing songs and listening to the youth-specific sermon delivered by a hyperactive man with a skinny mustache who called himself Brother Brad, I was scanning the room for someone who looked reticent, someone who wasn’t going forward to pray, cry, or be saved.

And I saw her: Erin. She was one of the very few people at Prairie Grove Middle School who made me look popular. She wore Toughskins jeans and heavy boys’ clothes from Sears, even though it was summer. As we sat in church that night, she clutched beneath her armpit a paperback book with a robot on the front cover. When she blinked, her bangs moved a little, in a clump.

I realize, of course, the irony of my thinking I could save someone else. But all I wanted, all I had ever wanted, was a mission, direction. I wanted to know exactly what to do. There was nowhere else in my life where the rules were clear. They certainly weren’t at home, where my father expressed anger by screaming and hitting, and my mother by ignoring me completely. I never knew what was going to set my parents off on any given day, and I never knew how to act at school. I walked around utterly terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing without realizing it. I was so bored and restless I could barely sit still, and I was always trying to contain my chants, to keep myself from moving my lips. Christianity, which is a paint-by-numbers religion if there ever was one, was perfect for me: you could always count on the Christians to tell you what to do.

The following morning, after a breakfast of reconstituted powdered scrambled eggs and warped white toast, I headed back to the cabin to find Erin. She had skipped volleyball, as had I, and she was wrapped in a
Star Wars
sleeping bag on her bed, reading a science fiction novel with a celery-stalk spine and no back cover.