Riverine (6 page)

Blood, 11

Heaven would be something different for everyone. It would be each person’s unique earthly happiness, manifesting in different ways. My heaven had wide sidewalks made of pure gold and castles made of milk chocolate with gold-plated widows that stretched toward another sky, another heaven, another layer in the great beyond. All day, and it was always daytime, God played a chocolate piano that had no white keys, and the music fell onto white-clad angels moved to monastic silence, like chocolate rain.

Over spring break of fifth grade, I started my period. I was the only girl in my class who had gotten it, and I was both ashamed and prideful. It did not go the way of the pancake ovaries and uterus with a smiling mother, sensitive and informative and helpful, helming the spatula, like we saw in the video at school. Instead, I was camping near the swamp with Corey and Marcus when it happened. A canoe’s ride away from home, I was surrounded by birds that we’d maimed with overcocked BB guns. Instead, my mother was nowhere to be found and I had to sneak the cordless phone from the living room, leaves still nestled in my matted hair, while my father watched television after work. I was not allowed to use the telephone unless I stayed in the room with my father and he approved the person I was calling. When I told him I wanted to call my mom, he demanded to know why. “Because,” I told him, which wasn’t enough. We went around and around like that until I was sobbing, pressed into a corner, and I finally told him the reason: blood. With that, we were both defeated, and I was permitted to leave the room. After I called my mom at work, hiding in the bathroom, she bought me a new denim dress that buttoned to the neck and still screamed “girl,” and my father looked awkward and angry. He would stay that way for years.

A few weeks later, when I still believed in my chocolate heaven, my parents decided I would take a bus to the Baptist church in the next town over every Sunday. While my father mowed the lawn with his shirt off and my mother napped or washed the dishes, I would go to church. My brother got to stay home, presumably because he was a boy. It could have been that they knew I’d been looking at the
Playboy
magazines in our bathroom, wedged beneath the stack of mismatched towels at my eye level. But no one mentioned that, and in any case, no one removed the magazines.

Once I was unloaded from the creaking bus and brought inside the aluminum-sided structure that was the church, strangers asked me if I was ready to be saved. This preceded the asking of my name and the shaking of hands, which was bad manners. From what I needed to be saved, I wasn’t sure. I wondered if my mother knew about that, but I said, “I am.”

A teary-eyed woman ushered me into a semicircle of souls volunteered for saving, all adolescent girls like me. Together, we formed an arc around another woman with curly hair and thick thighs. There were plenty of fat girls in church, I noticed. My father had told me that if I got fat, no one would marry me. The width of my hips concerned a shocking number of people, and I sensed that I was growing too quickly for their liking. In fifth grade, I was five feet, five inches tall and 103 pounds and already a B-cup. The other girls my age still looked like children; the boys snapped my bra and called me names. I was an island of growth and hormones.

“Do you accept Jesus as your savior?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you let Him into your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Will you live your life for Him and sing His praises?”

The singing was the only thing I enjoyed about the church—that and the fact that it gave me something to do, another place that permitted me to leave the compound of our home. I loved school but found the work boring, always done with tests well before my classmates. Church was more fun than school—it offered music and stories. I could get behind the energy of their music if I closed my eyes. I could make myself believe any story they told me if it meant someone, even an invisible someone, would love me back. I knew this because singing to Jesus, a total stranger professing love to me and anyone else who would take it, made me cry.

I wondered whether anyone ever said no, no. I cannot carry a tune, in fact. I will have to take a pass on the singing of praises; save that for so-and-so. I wished that my cousin Mandi were with me, but she was four towns away at another church because her parents were getting a divorce. And four towns in the country was something of a drive. Mandi would have made it all seem fun by drawing fancy hats on the Apostles in the workbook pages that followed the saving of souls.

At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was on Satan surveillance. The Baptists warned me that this lower-case “he” would uppercase “Get Inside” any way he could. Their fear followed me home. I breathed through my nose sparingly and squeezed my legs together at the crotch, plugging up all the openings I could think of as often as I could remember.
Can he shape-change and slither up into my heart through my vagina?
I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t trust him.

I opened one of the
Playboy
issues in our bathroom. Across a two-page spread, a man bent a woman over the hood of a red Corvette. The woman had platinum blond hair and wore a bandanna around her neck. She looked slightly frightened and slightly excited, as if it wasn’t what she wanted exactly but she was beginning to enjoy it anyway. The man had a small Afro and a huge, erect penis that was aimed at the woman’s rear end. This was how I imagined the devil would take me.

I stayed on guard all day and later that night. I looked for Satan in my fingertips and in my underwear, I looked for him in the grocery store, I looked for him in my closet while the others slept. I knew that he could make an offer on my soul at any moment. There was one thing I would trade it for: Corey to love me back.

That following night, Corey babysat me and my brother. I did not understand how, although I could bleed and bear children, I could not be left unattended while my parents went to a party. The three of us played truth or dare. We ate ketchup and peanut butter sandwiches and mouthfuls of toothpaste to prove we weren’t chicken. We admitted our fears and confessed our lies. It was me who left Marcus’s bike in the rain. Corey was afraid of spiders. Marcus had broken our walkie-talkies. Later, Marcus and I pretended to have gone to bed, but we were still playing the game. My next dare was to kiss Corey. I crept down the hallway and into the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. His legs were bent, one arm wrapped around them, the other holding the fire poker. He didn’t look up, though he must have heard me. I leaned in quick, my white nightgown swishing around my legs, and pecked him gently on the jaw. He reached forward and stirred the fire. It crackled and hissed. I ran away and climbed into bed, jittery, tearful, and feeling completely invisible.

I hid my own soul deep down in my spine to keep it from the Devil. If Corey didn’t want it, Satan couldn’t have it. I folded my hands in prayer. I was passed over, blood safe. Saved. I would go to a chocolate heaven. I waited for a vague notion of death that would take me there and fell asleep obsessing about my own funeral. Who would come? What would they wear? Would anyone cry? Would Corey?

Covenants, 13

Our Papa Lou had died, and no one was saying much about it. He was there for Christmas, and then he went to Florida with his cancer and didn’t come back. We thought they knew this was coming, but nobody would say. And anyway, we had another grandpa whom we liked almost as much and had known longer than this one.

“Don’t be sad, girls,” our mothers said to Mandi and me. “He’s watching you all the time.”

“Like Danny Boy?” I asked. We’d gotten Danny Boy after Fido died of cancer. We could not keep dogs alive. Danny Boy had been hit by a car. My mother said it was an old Ford pickup that hit him, a white one like the neighbor drove from home to work to the bar and home again each day.

“Exactly like that.”

I likened dead Papa Lou to Jesus and Santa, to Danny Boy and Fido. This bothered me because I preferred to pee alone, and now there were two invisible persons, one invisible God, and two dead dogs following me into the bathroom. It was getting crowded. I said to dead Papa Lou, as I’d said to the others, “Close your eyes when I have to go.” But how did I know he was listening?

Our mothers took us to the beach at Lake Michigan to cheer us up, although we were not very much in need of cheering. We felt cheated because we did not get to see the body. He went to ash, and into a jar. Then he went all across the Florida Keys, where he’d lived out the last of his cancer with my grandma.

“Our girls,” my mom said in her patented sad voice. She would have made an excellent professional mourner in another culture, another time; the roiling emotions to which she could not put words she easily refracted through the pain of others. Mandi and I wore the matching bathing suits they bought us, yellow one-pieces with pink flowers that rode up our backsides. Mandi preferred dragon-flies to flowers and I wanted a blue two-piece, but we had no choice. Through us, they would recreate the childhood they were robbed of by their own parents’ failures, even as we suffocated in it. We would be made in their likeness if it killed us all.

“It’s like looking at ourselves,” said Mandi’s mom, my aunt Eileen.

The sisters cried twin sets of tears, and we rolled our eyes.

“Get a therapist,” we joked under our breath.

My mother had brought a little paperback book by Danielle Steel and Aunt Eileen had brought a gigantic Bible, but they didn’t read. Books were decoration with these women. Instead, they watched us from behind their oversized sunglasses.

We looked absurd in our children’s swimsuits, but it was better than being at home, where there was nothing to do but watch the corn grow and poke the cats that slept in the windowsills. We began the rituals: arranging towels, removing sandals, nailing down our lightweight things with heavy things. That was where our routines diverged. Mandi ran headfirst into the water, without flinching when she reached the rocky parts that bit the balls of your feet. She dove in, eyes open, hair tangled against her face and neck. I lingered in the sand, hoping the water was not too cold, and tied my hair back into a safe ponytail. I inched my way in carefully. Toes, then ankles, then calves. I did not trust water to stay put.

Our mothers decided from behind their sunglasses that we would have a Girls’ Night. My father was going out again and Mandi’s parents were divorced. Our fathers had met in basic training fifteen years earlier and had never gotten too far out of one another’s sight until now. Marrying sisters seemed to be insurance against their separating. But with the divorce, loyalties had split.

Later, when we were done with painted fingernails and mud masks, Mandi and I said we were tired and filched the Ouija board game from under my mattress. We locked my door. Our mothers watched black-and-white films upstairs, ruminating over the bright spots of their collective past, that handful of Stardust they so cherished. Reliving the few happy memories they shared. They took turns crying over Jimmy Stewart because he looked like Grandpa McCann, whom we never met and whom they barely knew. There had been so many fathers that his true fatherness got watered down. He was reduced to three qualities: abusive drunk, Greyhound bus driver, dead in a bathtub from a heart attack at forty-one. Every story we heard about him could be categorized as one of the three.
Is that all a life came down to?
I wondered. I thought of Papa Lou. Funny, gentler than anyone else in our family, kept a small farm full of animals that we loved to tend. I had already reduced his life to that. I wondered if someday I would be like my mother and aunt: remembering my past in a dozen stories, six good, six bad, told and retold at Thanksgiving dinners. A glossed-over life. The day-to-day of it foggy.

Mandi and I stayed up that night cavorting with spirits. We were confounded by Milton Bradley’s genius. They had either packed souls into the flimsy board or aroused a desire in our minds strong enough to make us subconsciously move the pointer with our energized fingers. We didn’t care which was true. We asked to talk to Kurt Cobain, who had recently committed suicide. We asked for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It never occurred to us to talk to Papa Lou or Grandpa McCann.

But the rock stars were busy.

“Who am I going to marry?” I asked next.

The board pointed to C, then to E.

I knew one person with those initials: Corey. But I said, “Ew. Clint Eastwood? He’s old.”

“I’m never getting married,” Mandi said.

“Fine, I still am.”

Perfection of Grace, 14

By age thirteen, I had been to a dozen different churches or more. At one point, our town was featured in
The Guinness Book of World Records
for having the most churches per capita; there were plenty available options. New ones seemed to open every week, and I attended many of them with friends, via a bus or van that would pick me up from my house, or with another relative. I had been to the First Dutch Reform Church and the Second Dutch Reform Church. I had been to Grace Fellowship, which met in the gymnasium of my elementary school. I had been to the Virgie Christian Church, a tiny white chapel with narrow wooden pews. I went to the Nazareth Presbyterian Church for vacation Bible school, where I memorized the Lord’s Prayer. Everywhere, families entered, gathered, prayed, and exited together. I wondered what it was like, to be together and smiling with your family. To be dressed nicely together, to have had a breakfast of eggs and grits, share jovial chatter and then go to a movie. To have that be regular and not a once-a-year event.

One Sunday I went with Mandi to the Church of the Nazarene. Her mother—a true believer—had been church hopping as I had been, and this one wasn’t as far away. I did not know what
Nazarene
meant, but I imagined cloaked monks and secret, cobbled paths, knife rituals and possibly some sex. I was mistaken.

The Church of the Nazarene was made of wood, painted a deep brick red that flaked and chipped away in a strong wind. A large ramp wrapped around a small staircase that led to the unadorned door. I took the long way up. This church had very few windows, and inside it smelled permanently of sugar cookies, the weeks and weeks of postsermon refreshments having permeated the makeshift walls and thin carpets that lined the building’s interior. I was uncomfortable because we were late. The girls’ worship class had already started, and I didn’t want them to stare at me. I was Sarah, plain and tall, a newcomer in an established community. The girls would be mean. They would think my dress was ugly. My mother made me wear it, and she dressed me like a spinster, ensuring as much of my neck and chest and arms was covered as was possible. Since the age of eleven, I had begun to feel the attention of boys and men upon me, their gazes warm and penetrating as the sun. Even in churches.