Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  Right around the time he determined that he had no choice but to start dealing drugs, three of his best friends had joined Crossroads. For Bobby Jett it was a matter of a girl he was chasing, for Keith Stratton the allure of nine undersupervised days on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, and for David Goya, whose mother belonged to First Reformed, a not terribly punishing punishment for multiple curfew violations. Under Rick Ambrose, Crossroads had begun to undermine traditional social categories. Seemingly unlikely candidates for Christian fellowship drifted in, gave it a try. Among the ones who stuck with it, to Perry’s surprise, were all three of his friends. They still partied of a weekend, but their center of conversational gravity had shifted. Referring warmly to the Arizona trip, or more archly to the sensitivity training they did on Sunday nights, or more lubriciously to certain choice girls on the Crossroads roster, they made Perry feel excluded from a thing that sounded fun.

  After a harrowing spring, followed by a summer of inhaling lawn-mower exhaust and getting wasted and rereading Tolkien, he proposed to Ansel Roder that the two of them check out Crossroads. Roder refused emphatically (“I’m not into cults”), and so Perry, on his first Sunday night in tenth grade, walked by himself into the vault-ceilinged third-floor room that Crossroads had appropriated in his father’s church. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e. e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KILLS. Before Perry knew it, he was being hugged by David Goya, physical contact with whom he’d heretofore naturally avoided. In the ensuing minutes, he was touched by—squeezed by, pulled into the exciting breasts of—twenty times more female bodies than he’d touched like that in his entire life. Very pleasant! After greetings and administrative business, the group marched downstairs, a hundred strong, to the church’s function hall, where the touching, male and female, in various formats, continued for another two hours. The only uncomfortable moment came when Perry, introducing himself to the group, alluded to his dad’s being the associate minister “here.” He glanced at Rick Ambrose and was pierced by a pair of burning dark eyes, slightly narrowed in puzzlement or suspicion, as if to ask, Does your dad know you’re here?

  The Reverend did not know it. Since Perry seemed unable to argue with him without crying, he habitually concealed as much as he could for as long as he could. The following Sunday, to forestall any questions, he told his mother that he was having dinner at Roder’s, and he did stop in there, for a while, to consume freezer pizza and apparently quite a volume of gin and grape soda in front of the color TV in the Roders’ comfortably appointed cellar. Though he was noted for holding his liquor well, things started happening so fast when he arrived at Crossroads that he couldn’t remember them all later. It was possible he’d stumbled or lurched. He found himself confronted by two older advisers, alumni of the group, and informed that he was drunk. Rick Ambrose came wading through the crowd and led him out into a hallway.

  “I don’t care if you want to be drunk,” Ambrose said, “but you’re not doing it here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why are you even here? Why did you come?”

  “I don’t know. My friends…”

  “Are they drunk?”

  Fear of punishment was killing Perry’s buzz. He shook his head.

  “You’re damn right they’re not,” Ambrose said. “I ought to just send you home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you really? Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to be part of this group?”

  Perry hadn’t decided yet. But it was undeniably pleasant to have the full attention of the mustachioed leader about whom his irreverent friends spoke admiringly; to be in frank conversation, for once, with an adult. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  Ambrose took him back into the smoke-filled room and interrupted regular programming for one of the plenary Confrontations that were at the heart of Crossroads praxis. The issues at hand were alcohol use, respect for one’s peers, and self-respect. Kids Perry barely knew addressed him as if they knew him very well. David Goya told him that he was an amazing person but that he, David, sometimes worried that he, Perry, used drugs and liquor to avoid his real emotions. Keith Stratton and Bobby Jett piped up in the same key. The thing went on and on and on. Although in some respects Perry had never experienced anything more horrible, he was also thrilled by the quantity and intensity of attention he was getting, as a sophomore and a newcomer, just for having drunk some gin. When he broke down in tears, weeping with shame, authentically, the group responded in a kind of ecstasy of supportiveness, advisers praising him for his courage, girls crawling over to hug him and stroke his hair. It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval. To be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant. Perry wanted more of this drug.

  When the group headed down to the function hall for activities, Rick Ambrose held him back and collared him in a headlock evidently meant to be affectionate. “Well done,” Ambrose said, releasing him.

  “Frankly, I’d assumed I’d be severely punished.”

  “You didn’t think that was severe? They really let you have it.”

  “I do feel a bit put through the ringer.”

  “One thing, though.” Ambrose lowered his voice. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there were some hard feelings when your father left the group. I feel bad about it, and I really don’t know what to do. But if you want to be here, I need to know your dad’s okay with it. I need to know you’re here for your own sake, not because of something going on with you and him.”

  “He doesn’t even know. I wasn’t even thinking of him.”

  “Well, you need to fix that. He needs to know. Are we clear?”

  Perry’s conversation with the Reverend, later that night, was thankfully short. His father made a trembling steeple of his fingers and regarded them sadly. “I’d be lying,” he said, “if I told you that your mother and I aren’t worried about you. I think you need some kind of purpose in your life. If this is what you want it to be, I won’t stop you.” Perry’s analysis was that he was actually of such small concern to his father that his joining the enemy camp didn’t even merit anger.

  By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them (making sure, of course, that you were noticed doing this). Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you (conspicuously) introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth. Instead of being strong, you blubbered. Where his tears on the night of drinking gin had been cathartic, his tears later on came more easily and were a more fungible currency, redeemable for progress toward the inner circle. Because it was a game, he was good at it, and although intimacies achieved by game-theoretical calculation were hard to feel great about, he sensed that other people genuinely valued his insights and were genuinely moved by his emotional displays.

  The person he feared he wasn’t fooling was the one whose approval really mattered to him, Rick Ambrose. He admired Ambrose for, among other things, his intellectually plausible faith in God. Perry himself had yet to hear from God; maybe the lines were down, or maybe there was simply no one at the other end. One boring summer afternoon, he’d gone through one of his father’s religious magazines with a ballpoint and replaced every reference to God with “Steve,” for the hilarity of it. (Who was Steve? Why were otherwise sane-seeming people going on and on about Steve?) But Ambrose had an idea so elegant that
Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.

  And now the dangerous lottery system, for which Perry had unwisely voted, had thrown him together with her. Being a furtive and curious little worm, he knew every nook in First Reformed. In the function hall, behind a door that looked locked but wasn’t, was a spacious coat closet into which, as the other “dyad” partners dispersed around the first floor of the church, he led his sister. They sat down crosslegged on the linoleum beneath rows of empty wooden hangers. A bare overhead bulb lit a dusty punch bowl, packages of waxed-paper cups, two orphaned umbrellas.

  “So,” he said, his eyes on the floor.

  “Yeah, so.”

  “We could use some sort of system of marking slips to avoid this.”

  “Agreed.”

  Grateful that she agreed, he looked up at her. She didn’t have a Crossroads wardrobe yet, no overalls, no painter’s pants, no army jacket, but she was wearing an old sweater that at least had some holes in it. He still couldn’t believe she’d joined Crossroads; it upset the natural order of things.

  “I really admire how smart you are,” she said in a rote kind of tone, not looking at him.

  “Thank you, sister. And I admire, I really do, how sincere you always are. You’ve got a lot of phony friends, but you’re not phony. It’s actually kind of amazing.” Seeing her mouth harden, he added, “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to criticize your friends. I was trying to say something positive about you.”

  Her mouth remained set.

  “Maybe we should move right along to the barriers,” he said. “I suspect it’s more fruitful terrain.”

  She nodded. “What is a thing I’m doing that’s a barrier to you getting to know me better.”

  Perry realized that the wording of the exercise left something to be desired. It presupposed, for example, that he and Becky wanted to get to know each other better.

  “I would say,” he said, “that the fact that you don’t seem to like me, and always seem vaguely pissed off with me, including right now, and haven’t tried to have a personal conversation with me in the last three or four years, at least not one that I can remember, despite our living in the same house, could be considered something of a barrier.”

  She laughed, but in a shaky way, as if a sob had also been an option. “Guilty as charged,” she said.

  “You don’t like me.”

  “I mean the part about us never having a personal conversation.”

  Her face, which he took this unusual opportunity to observe from up close, was faultless. One’s eye sought for a blemish (he himself had several raging) or some underlying feature that detracted, a thinness of lip, a squareness of jaw, a defect of nose, and found none. Same thing with her long, straight, shining hair, which was of a richer color than the slightly false-seeming yellow of his own: she had the platonic teen-girl hair to which other girls compared their own invidiously. Perry could see why the world considered Becky attractive, but also why it was wrong to. An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive. It could be a thing that merely offered no resistance to the eye, like an invisible balloon on a string. Maddened by the sight of a taut vertical string that ended in nothingness, people followed it around and concluded, from their following it, that it must be highly desirable.

  He didn’t like her either.

  “So it’s something I’m doing,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

  “In this half of the exercise, yes. I’m naming what appears to me to be a barrier.”

  “Well, one thing that’s kind of a barrier for me is the way you speak. Are you aware of how you sound?”

  “Let the character assassination begin.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. The way you just said that. Like you’re an English aristocrat.”

  “I have a Midwestern accent, Becky.”

  The flaw of redness entered her face. “How do you think it feels to the rest of us to be around a person who’s always looking down on us, like we’re funny to him? Who’s always smirking like he knows something we don’t know.”

  Perry frowned. To object that he didn’t look down on Judson, except in the most literal physical sense, would have conceded her larger point.

  “Who acts like I’m mentally deficient because I got a B in chemistry.”

  “Chemistry isn’t a subject for everyone.”

  “But you’ll get an A-plus in it, won’t you. Without even trying. Without even giving a shit.”

  “It could happen. But you could have done it, too, if you really wanted. I don’t think of you as dumb, Becky. That’s just false.”

  He could feel himself becoming sentimental, and there were no points to be scored for it here, in the privacy of the coat closet, with his sibling.

  “I’m talking about my feelings,” she said. “You can’t say a feeling is false.”

  “Yes, true. So, you’re saying you feel that my being good at school is a barrier.”

  “No. I’m saying I don’t feel like you’re even there. Like you’re a thousand miles away from all of us. I’m saying that doesn’t make me want to get to know you better.”

  Despite having every conceivable social privilege at high school, Becky wasn’t just day-tripping in Crossroads, wasn’t just slumming—he had to grant her that. She was giving it a real go, being open about her feelings, exercising honesty and confrontation, if perhaps falling short with the unconditional love. She was in the initial phase of Crossroads fervor. He himself had advanced through this phase so rapidly that by the time of the group’s first weekend retreat, in October, at a lakeside Christian conference center in Wisconsin, he’d felt a kind of nostalgic pity for the fellow sophomore, Larry Cottrell, who solemnly approached him with a broken rock. Frost by the lake had cracked the pebbles there, and some inner-circler had been inspired to give somebody one half of a pebble and keep the other, as a symbol of their being two halves of one whole, and this had quickly become a thing. Perry, who didn’t know Cottrell well, was touched to receive a half pebble from him, followed by a hug, but not for the intended reason. What touched him was Cottrell’s naïveté. Perry knew it was a game and Cottrell didn’t yet. He might have been similarly touched by Becky’s fervor if he could only figure out why she, the undisputed queen of her senior class, had deigned to join Crossroads in the first place.

  He was on the verge of asking her why—confronting her—when she launched into the most extraordinary diatribe.

  “The barrier,” she said, “is that I don’t actually believe you’re a good person. Do you have any idea how crazy it’s been for me to be in Crossroads? The first night I was here, do you know what people kept telling me? How great my younger brother is. Emotionally open, easy to relate to, incredibly supportive. And I’m thinking, are we talking about the same person? I actually wondered if I’d been a bad sister. Like, maybe I never to
ok the time to get to know the real you. Maybe I was too self-involved to notice how emotionally open you are. But you know what? I don’t think that’s it. I think I’ve been exactly the sister you wanted me to be. Have I ever said a word to Dad or Mom about what everybody else knows about you? I could have. I could have said, Hey, Dad, are you aware that Perry’s the biggest pothead at Lifton Central? Are you aware he hasn’t made it through a day unstoned all year? That he goes up to the third floor after you’re in bed and uses drugs? That his friends are all junior alcoholics and everybody in the high school knows it? I’ve protected you, Perry. And all you do is sneer at me. You sneer at all of us.”

  “Not true,” he said. “In fact, I think each one of you is a better person than I am. I mean—‘sneer’? Really? You think I sneer at Jay?”

  “Judson is like your pet. That’s exactly the way you treat him. You use him when you need him and you ignore him when you don’t. You use your friends, you use their drugs, you use their houses. And, I swear to God, you’re using Crossroads, too. You’re smart enough to get away with it, but I can see what you’re doing. That first Sunday, when people were telling me how great you are, I thought I was crazy. But you know who else agrees with me? Rick Ambrose.”

  Although the linoleum floor was cold, the closet felt overwarm to Perry, short on oxygen, bathyspheric.

  “He thinks you’re trouble,” Becky said relentlessly. “That’s what he told me.”

  Perry’s mind started down the road of imagining the circumstances under which she’d heard this from Ambrose but stopped and turned back. It was as if he’d been born dispossessed, by his sister. No sooner had he found a game he could play well, a place where he was valued for his skill at playing it, an adult whom he could actually admire, than his sister came along and overnight turned Ambrose against him, claimed Ambrose for herself.