Riverine (7 page)

“This is my cousin, Angela,” Mandi said to the group. We stood there, an alarming spectrum of traits spread across our faces in one matrilineal stroke: toothy, trusting smiles paired with suspicious eyes. We waited for the question.

“Cousins? You look like sisters.”

We shrugged. We never had a good answer for this.

The class’s leader invited us into their circle. We sat. A Bible was passed around the circle, lap to lap. We took turns reading lines from the book of Matthew.

When it was my turn, I read, “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” I passed the book to the blond girl on my right. I wanted to be as blond as the women in my father’s magazines, and I didn’t like her because she was blond by nature and because she looked at my dress disapprovingly. I wanted to say
my mother made me wear this
, but I kept quiet. I wanted to say
this streak of gold in my hair is for real
, but the truth was I squeezed lemon juice onto it and sat in full sunlight so it would lighten even though it sometimes got so hot that I nearly passed out.

I felt an urge to walk out of the room when they started singing. I almost acted on it, and then I looked to Mandi for her approval. She was not singing. She only moved her lips to the words, so I moved my lips, too.

Omniscience, 14

Besides Mandi, I had a best friend, Valerie. We bought necklaces that announced our friendship in two halves of a heart that when pressed together fit like a zipper down the center. After a few weeks at the Church of the Nazarene, I went with her family to Saint Cecilia’s on Sunday mornings. This church had very high ceilings, which I think was on purpose—meant to make the patrons feel small and unworthy of a god so large and a religion so hierarchical.

I never stayed at one church for long. Some I attended only once. Others I attended for weeks or months. I was a religion junkie, arbitrarily adopting any beliefs I encountered—Baptist, Presbyterian, Dutch Reform, Methodist. But in rural Indiana, they were all variations on the same concept—patriarchal, restrictive, and full of people who looked and acted more or less the same. I remained outside their communities, even as I attempted, albeit halfheartedly, to integrate into them. I’d been told my grandmother became a Buddhist, temporarily, while she was living on the South Side of Chicago, and this knowledge pulled at me, a kind of tether between us. Mostly, I went to churches with other people’s families while my family stayed at home. Intermittently my mother would redouble her efforts to instill in us “Christian values” by going to church with me and my brother. The slogan she adopted and would use for years to come was a ubiquitous salvation whose principles of honesty, abstinence, and obedience reflected the core of my parents’ parenting style. As a consequence of those principles, I was forced to lie to get through life as a mildly sinful human. I feared punishment, and operated largely in an effort to avoid it. I learned much later that negative punishment of children—both corporal and noncorporal—was detrimental to their psychological development. I had been subjected to both. Spending weekends at Valerie’s house afforded me more freedom than I’d ever known. When we walked outside the house into the backyard to swim, we didn’t have to ask permission. When we rode her brother’s moped around the subdivision, no one raised an eyebrow. When we had male friends come over to watch a movie with us, it was no big deal. I was relieved to be normal, neutral, innocent until proven guilty. “We would be so ashamed if you got into trouble,” my mother would say. I never heard her say the word
pregnant
, but that’s what she meant—their ultimate fear. It didn’t matter what the circumstances were—going to the Pizza Hut with kids from school, going to Friday-night football games. When I did go, one or both of my parents went, too, and my father watched me closely, sometimes making accusations that were not true, insisting he saw me kissing some boy or another. But I could go to church and I could go to Valerie’s house, no questions asked. No tagalong, suspicious parent.

While I visited churches, Corey visited boys’ homes and juvenile detention centers. His behavior had started to change. He was becoming a troublemaker—getting kicked out of school, being arrested for petty delinquency, running away from home. But he was no different from me. One night I told him over our walkie-talkies that a girl at school was hitting me and harassing me at lunch for no reason. He asked who it was, and I told him. He said he’d take care of it. She never bothered me again. Still, he came over to see us less. Often his window stayed dark at night. I didn’t know where he was, how to reach him, or when he’d be back. But then as suddenly as he’d left, he’d show up one day, smiling and dribbling a basketball, and everything would be back to normal.

My father would not attend church. “I believe in God,” he once told me, “but I’ll never go to church.” The thought of my father praying to any god, even privately, was unfathomable.

“Can’t you do it for Mom?” If it would make her feel loved, somehow make our family seem more united, then I wished it for her.

“No,” he said. End of discussion.

I prayed the same prayers to the same mysterious god at these churches, ignoring the rules of their various belief systems. The differences between them were unclear to me. Showing up to pray, to feel something, was the extent of my commitment. I was there because I wanted something back, not because it was right or good. I prayed for a mother who could find more worth in herself than my father would lead her to believe she possessed. Once, I thought a prayer had come true. My mother emerged from her bedroom dressed for an office holiday party wearing a black dress. She had swept her hair up into a neat bun, put on makeup, and traded her glasses for contacts. She glowed. She was making an entrance, and I rooted for her silently as if she were in the running for homecoming queen. She presented herself to my father, smiling. He told her she looked like a fat geisha, and sent my mother spinning back into herself. Down and out. Another time, when she enrolled in night classes at the nearest Purdue extension campus, I thought it had happened. “I won’t have a wife that makes more money than me,” he said. Between his discouraging her and her being unable to comprehend algebra, she stopped. At all of the churches, I prayed for a father who was not so harsh, a father who replied, “Yes, dear?” when I said, “Dad, Dad. Dad, I have something to say,” instead of staring at the television or banging away with a hammer until I simply gave up and went away. I prayed for a brother who was not pressed flat by my father’s big thumbs, who was not knocked upside the head and brought to tears for every tiny infraction of my parents’ impossible standards. I prayed for a home where yelling wasn’t the main means of communication. I prayed for my parents to divorce—an end to a constant state of what felt to me like disorder and tension. I prayed for Corey to stay home, to look straight at me, count my freckles, touch an index finger to the chicken pox scar above my right eyebrow, and say, “What’s this from?” I prayed for him to keep looking. I did not pray for myself specifically because I didn’t have words for what it was I needed or wanted. In my mind I was already gone from our home, and I had taken Corey and Marcus with me to the future.

There was less music in the Catholic church than in others I’d visited. What I liked most about Catholicism was the forced kindness between the parish’s members, an instant community of positivity. “Peace be with you,” I said with a shy smile to the middle-aged woman in front of me at my friend’s church. Her hands were thin and frail, and I didn’t want to let go. I wanted her to know that I meant it. I wanted her to see that I was earnest. I tried to look empathetic, tried to absorb some of her problems, whatever they might be. But Catholics didn’t want to win you over the way that Baptists did, or even the way that Methodists did. They didn’t want you nearly as badly. No one recruited visitors to join the Catholic faith. Their faith required far more than a spirit of volunteerism. The woman shrank away from me and turned to spread the peace elsewhere.

The ritual responses became familiar quickly, rolling off my tongue like cotton clouds puffed into the air. I uttered them as though I’d been saying them for years, and this was a comfort even though I knew it was a lie. Which brings me to the topic of confession. In Catholicism, non-Catholics are prohibited from partaking in many of the faith’s perks, including confession. This turned out to be a real disappointment, even more so than being prohibited from taking communion, when you have to sit in the pew while the rest of the faithful in your row sashay by you to line up for the Eucharist. Stark exclusion from this particular religious perk felt like the equivalent of a dunce cap. “Dunskey,” my father called us at home. He had endless ways of noting our stupidity. I said it over and over to myself while I waited for the rest of my aisle to return.
Dunskey, dunskey
. Almost rhymed with
drunksky, skunksky
.

My Catholic friend and I had been writing poetry. We filled the widely lined pages of black-and-white composition tablets. We revised and rewrote, drawing flowers and clouds around the final drafts with crayons. These poems were mostly abstract constructions of our overwhelming feelings. Often, we brought ourselves to laughter and tears within the space of a minute. We wrote about grievances against the authorities of school and home. We wrote about grievances of the heart. This boy did not call, this boy liked another girl. This one said he would see us at the basketball game, but where was he? Woe was us. The poems were totems of our coming of age, a record of our existence.
We were here
, we wrote in black ink. We wanted badly to matter, but there was nothing artful about our words.

There was a transgression I wanted to confess, but no one in the Catholic church would hear it. One Sunday, I said I had to use the bathroom. I lingered outside the confession box, looking into the screened grate. I could hear the monotone call and responses in the church’s cathedral. The voices echoed down the hall. A week earlier, I had been filling another composition tablet with depressing pop song lyrics in my room when someone hooted at me. I went to the window and Corey was there with two other neighborhood boys, Brandon and Micah. I tried to play it cool, but I was giddy that he’d come to see me without my asking him over. The three of them were all older than me and, while they never spoke to me at school, they doted on me in their own boyish ways or teased me almost sweetly when we were in our own territory—the Kankakee swamp, river rat country. Occasionally we would play Hackey Sack on the porch or video games in our living room or eat an entire bag of Doritos while laughing at nothing. They usually ran off when my dad’s truck hauled onto our road after work because I wasn’t allowed to be alone with them, or any boy, for that matter. But this time, I was alone and the three of them were outside, sitting on the little hill outside my window, right below Corey’s bedroom window. They were drunk—their eyes were bright and their smiles were soft and playful. The sun was nearly sunk and my parents were gone later than usual. “Take it off,” one of them called. Then a sharp, short whistle.

The idea must have come from Corey. Neither of the other boys would have spoken to me like that without his lead or approval. For a while, I had noticed his light snapping off as soon as I closed my bedroom door at night, wrapped in a towel after showering. It was surprising that parents who were paranoid about my exposed body had not thought to install blinds on my bedroom window. I wasn’t sure that Corey had been watching me, but I would take my time getting dressed, sitting naked on my bed to brush my hair and put on lotion. Had he seen? He’d never said anything.

I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing a gray White Sox T-shirt featuring Snoopy dressed in a team uniform with faded khaki shorts. “Very funny,” I called back.

My light was on and it was almost dark. I had watched Corey in his room at this time of night many times before, lifting weights and pacing back and forth, growing his muscles and his manhood. So I knew they could see me well even though it was getting hard for me to distinguish them as anything but voices in the night. “Come on,” one said impatiently.

Awkward as it felt, I craved their attention—from Corey especially, whom I adored secretly and from afar. Things were changing between us. I could tell by the way that he gripped my thighs when he carried me on his back and by the way that he could no longer look me in the eyes when we were near one another. We orbited ever closer to some unnamed center. A gravity had begun. We were happy when we were together, an easy fit, even if we were unsure of what to do or say. I couldn’t remember a day of my life when I hadn’t known him, or imagine a future that didn’t include him.

I moved my arm slightly and leaned forward, discreetly looking down my own shirt. I was wearing a black bra with a red plaid print that wrapped around the cups. My underwear even matched. I took this to be evidence of serendipity. Of God’s approval. A prayer crossed my mind—I beseeched the dead to look away. I was tired of being watched by angels. Some things weren’t meant for them to witness.

“We’re getting bored,” Brandon said. “Take something off.” They did sound bored, but they also sounded hopeful. Still, their boredom felt like my personal failure. I wanted to apologize for disappointing them.

Instead of turning off my light and rising above the situation that was unfolding, I decided that this could be an opportunity to become more womanly, more like the women I had seen in
Playboy
. It was a chance to ensure that Corey would look at me and see me as I wanted him to—as more than his friend, more than a playmate he had nearly outgrown. If two more boys had to witness the invitation, so be it. It would be worth it. I took off my T-shirt, my back to the window, and then turned around to face them. One of them whistled louder, but I’d run out of courage. I stood there for a few seconds, willing myself to do something else. But what?

“Is that it?” one of them called. I knew they had actual
Playboys
they could be enjoying.