Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (33 page)

Theo glossed over the implications of the five husbands by describing the woman as “unclean,” a term he didn’t quite manage to define for the children. Instead, he looked my way and allowed a flicker of accusation to travel from him to me, waking me from my daydream about the ordinary human passion the woman must have begun to feel for that young man who preached so far and wide about love and compassion. And then it struck me. Just like the deacon who had been horror-struck by my summer reading, Theo must have thought of me as a fallen woman.

Was it something I happened, at that very moment, to be unwittingly projecting—that I had, indeed, defied the Bible’s admonitions to remain chaste until marriage? It couldn’t have been my clothes; there was nothing suggestive or revealing about my T-shirts or my jeans or the demure dresses I always wore on Sundays. Was I releasing some pheromone that only devout Christians could detect? There must have been an explanation for why Theo—and, come to think of it, some of the other churchgoers that summer—seemed suddenly to regard me with discernible disappointment or barely disguised contempt.

And then, slowly, like a photo taking form in a basin of developer, I began to understand the rumor that was circulating among the congregants of First Baptist. I had been within earshot when it was first set loose at a ladies’ prayer luncheon in our own dining room just days after I’d arrived back home:
And Dear Lord
, a white-haired woman in fuchsia had said, with her arms raised Southern Baptist style so that they seemed to hover in the air like rabbit ear antennae,
we pray for Kathryn’s daughter Tracy and her relationship
(she’d paused just before that word, as if not sure she ought to use it)
with her boyfriend
. The six or seven ladies sitting alongside, my mother among them, had responded with some hushed variant of
Yes, Lord
and
We lift her up to You
. I was tiptoeing past the dining room table with a saucer of coffee cake to bring upstairs to my room when the prayer went around, when I heard my name and the unspoken assumption—that I was in danger of surrendering my virginity or, worse, that it had already gone the way of my milk teeth. Everyone’s eyes were closed, but fearing that a reaction of any kind on my part would merely serve to confirm what they had all been instructed to suspect, I strode past with all the poise I could summon, not breaking stride and with my chin up. I told myself that once I crossed from the parquet dining room floor to
the carpet of the family room, I would be safe. Step by step across the hardwood floor, I willed my face to remain serenely blank. Every other day, it was the span of a few quick steps, but just then, the family room seemed infinitely far away. Step by step, I forced my features into a blank, placid expression and denied my eyes the opportunity to steal even a quick glance at the ladies at the table, lest any of them were watching. I walked past as though nothing were out of the ordinary, like a man who maintains unblinking eye contact when lying to your face.

Sitting that day in the air-conditioned Sunday school building with its three windows overlooking a concrete walkway and lawn dappled with trees, I felt an ire rise in my throat. Suddenly, I was livid at Theo and his mother and the chain of churchgoers who had passed that kernel of gossip back and forth under the guise of prayerful concern. For the first time, I allowed myself to savor a single dram of anger toward my mother—not for her wish that I remain the girl she had instructed me to be but for her need to discuss with others the girl she feared I was vying to become. I felt something else, too. Pushed as I was to consider the conflict that had been set into motion by my decision to go against what I’d been taught, my anger mingled with my nascent sexual knowledge, forming a very exhilarating third thing that seemed to fit quite nicely under the name
Independence
.

It was almost lunchtime. Some of the kids had grown restless from hunger. Some of them only came to Vacation Bible School in the first place for the meals or because their parents wanted them kept busy and out of the house for a few hours each day; it struck me as funny, thinking that my mom might have wanted the very same thing for me.

“He stands at the door of your heart and knocks,” Theo was
saying in yet another attempt to persuade the kids to give their barely formed lives over to the Lord.

I walked over to an empty seat at one of the long classroom tables and, sitting down, took out a piece of paper and a pen.

God is not that small
.

I wrote it over and over again, until Theo commanded us to bow our heads in prayer.

A STRANGE THING TO DO

T
here was one other source of anxiety that would have been felt not just by me but by my parents as well that summer: just a few weeks before classes were set to resume, I was planning a trip to Portugal with my boyfriend.

My parents had agreed to let me go because I was an adult and possibly because I’d presented the trip to them as something other than what it actually was. “His father and stepmother have a house there, and they’ve invited me and about eight other kids to come and stay there for a couple of weeks.” That was mostly true. There would be a whole group of us there, all together, boys and girls. But in order to justify my going and to dissuade my parents from envisioning me as party to the kinds of carnal behavior that leaving the country with one’s boyfriend surely conjured in their minds, I’d had to assure them that my boyfriend’s parents would be there the whole time as chaperones, which was not true. Every time the trip was brought up, I was careful to mention that his parents would be there, that they were behind the invitation. Sometimes, I’d mention them just randomly as the property owners, which, I hoped, implied that they would be present the whole time, dutifully minding their property (and their son). I mentioned them so often that I began to feel a kind of nervousness about meeting them, though of course there was no threat of that because they wouldn’t be there. The fact that my parents never asked to be put in touch with
my boyfriend’s father and stepmother stood out to me then as a sign that my story was credible; they must have believed it, I told myself, just as they must have trusted that my correspondence with my teacher was nothing to worry about. Of course, it may well have been precisely the reverse: my parents wanting to allow me my freedom and hoping, as they’d hoped with each of my siblings before me, that I’d use it wisely. Hence, my mother’s prayers all summer:
We pray for Tracy and her relationship with her boyfriend
. Hence the need, for full effect, for me to be within earshot of such prayers whenever possible. She hoped it might not be too late for me to choose to do the right thing.

My father was less subtle. After dinner one night, he held my gaze steadily in his and said, “We don’t condone what you’re doing.” He didn’t say more, and he didn’t need to. His words, and the look that accompanied them—not an angry or a judgmental one but one of frank honesty, like one adult addressing another—had hit home. I felt sorry that the choice I made—the choice I was desperate to follow through upon and the life I thought it might point me toward (a life of travel and of meaningful kinds of experiences and, finally, of the adult love I’d taken so long to really trust was available to me)—meant having to lie to my parents or live knowing I was the object of their regret. When I was really honest with myself, I knew it meant both lying and knowing, which put an uncomfortable damper on whatever else I’d set out to feel.

Because my parents didn’t approve of the trip—they merely allowed it—I’d had to save up the money on my own. I had spent two grueling weeks working on the dorm crew at the end of the spring semester—cleaning dorms and helping to prepare the campus for commencement and reunions. Not only was it backbreaking work; it was the kind of work that made me feel as if I were
undoing whole chapters of the history of American racial progress. There I was, black, on my hands and knees, scrubbing the bathtubs that had been dirtied all year long by the children of the privileged class. Never mind that my own dormitory bathtub was just then being scrubbed by someone else, what the job forced me to feel was a kind of abject need and a subservience that I was without recourse to refuse. I left work with a kind of shame at what I had inflicted upon myself. But if I hadn’t, who would have paid for my plane ticket, and how much longer would I have had to wait to taste that bit of sought-after independence?

Back home, Wanda paid me a bit of money each week to clean her apartment (I did a lackluster job but not out of the same sense of embarrassment that had characterized my stint on dorm crew). I believe she took pity on me, having recalled how she, too, had gone against our parents’ better judgment in taking her own solo trip to Europe the year she turned twenty-seven. Mom and Dad had worried that she might come to harm, that she’d be opening herself up to too much risk, that she was wasting time and money when she ought to have been finding a real job. But Wanda had gone anyway, needing to feed her sense of adventure, needing to test out her appetite for the world, wanting to know who she would become once she set foot outside the confines of her familiar world. I remember how galvanized she’d seemed upon her return home. She glowed with a joy at what and whom she’d encountered, and with a different sense of herself, too. She had new clothes—gladiator sandals bought in Greece and bohemian chic clothes from France and Italy. Sometimes, she’d let me borrow an oversized Fiorucci belt or squeeze my feet into a pair of her tiny shoes. After I’d worn her London Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt to school several times, an older boy muttered under his breath, but audibly,
“Never been to London.” I was crestfallen but only partly so, for if my sister had been off to see the world, it meant that one day I’d get there, too.

Michael had spent half his junior year of college in Austria. We still teased him sometimes about the calls that would come through from heavily accented girls looking for him, girls he’d surely made some impression upon while he was living in their country. He didn’t feel as strongly as Wanda or my parents that I ought or ought not to be making the trip. Once, when the subject of my plans came up, a friend of his from work, a woman, told me, “Spike said to me, ‘I can’t get over the fact that some guy is porking my sister.’ And do you know what I told your brother? I told him, ‘He is if she knows what’s good for her.’ ” And while I didn’t quite warm to the term “porking”—it turned my relationship into something sordid, a drunken punch line and nothing more—the comment reinforced the extent to which, no matter what I said, it was a given for everyone in the know that I was very likely to be having sex. Maybe that was Michael’s way of processing the mix of surprise and understanding that accompanied his discovery that I, too, had crossed over from a state of innocence.

Sex. Put like that, it sounds merely as if I had been initiated into the animal kingdom, had been activated in my biological destiny to move fully through the evolutionary cycle of birth, reproduction, and death. Sex. The noun that had hung over so much of my adolescence like a threat, like a plague to be avoided, like a snare waiting to snap me up as if I were a rabbit or a careless bear. Sex. The noun that encapsulated so many different kinds of verbs, all different shades of more or less the same thing: sleeping together, fucking, fornicating, being up to something, playing with fire, making love, living in sin. But also being caught up in
the wordless feelings of elation and suspense and surprise that, I now knew, made everything—all of the longing and the waiting and the little anxieties about being wanted or not—worth it. Being alive and unafraid in my own body and feeling in control of how, why, and to whom I let myself go. It was a step into a world where the terms were less easy to pin down, where feelings and facts and opinions sometimes did funny things in response to one another, sometimes refusing to lie still. It was a world where, for once, I knew that what I thought I’d known all along, what I’d been taught to know, while still true in many ways, was not the only truth. Where, finally, I was flawed and implicated and awake to experience in a way that felt like a gift. Sex. What a strange thing to do, to want to do, and yet, what a strange thing, too, to get so bent out of shape about. What a strange worry to carry, especially if it’s not you you’re worried about but someone else. Sex. The thing that made me
me
as distinct from my parents and that made me finally feel older, finally mature in a way that nothing could undo.

It would have been nice to have had someone to talk to about it. Instead, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it all meant. I started to write a play in which a woman sitting up naked in her bed was having a version of this conversation with herself, describing what it felt like to lie down under the weight of her lover and feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed. Then I began to worry that my mother might find the play and read it and be horrified by what she saw, so I tore it up and put it into the big black garbage cans along the side of the house.