Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  At the church there is a clan of a dozen or so children ranging from babies to preteens and we are tight-knit, interwoven until we are like family, living what seems to us like a perfectly normal childhood. When not working or doing chores, we play hide and seek, we spend long hours outdoors, exploring plant and insect and tree. Our church is focused on education, on the arts, and we put on plays on homemade stages, with curtains made of blankets, well-choreographed reenactments of historical accounts or old poems.

  There are the adult Bible studies on Thursdays that last late into the night, until one or two in the morning, and my brother and I sleep with the other kids in temporary beds until my mother comes to scoop us up, into the car, and we can finally go home. It must be hard for my mother, who works long days as a mechanic. It’s always early mornings for her.

  Then there are the moments that don’t seem normal at all, like the November when we’re kept up late into the night, sitting in the Matriarch’s room, watching the 1992 presidential elections come to a close. We collectively wring our hands and I shift uncomfortably on the thick white carpet, sick with dread, staring up at the screen with little understanding of what is happening except that Ross Perot must win. He doesn’t and this marks the End Times and the coming of the Antichrist.

  There also is the night the Matriarch prophesized would be the final day, because the second coming of Christ is due to happen at some point during the night. We stay up praying, praying hard, and when he doesn’t come I think it’s a failure on my part, for not praying hard enough, not believing strongly enough (a recurring theme for all prayers unanswered). No one ever seems to question the Matriarch for this miscalculation, her prophecy unfilled. We simply wake at some point after dawn, a little relieved to see the morning sky instead of heavenly trumpets or a whirlwind of fire and air, which all sounded kind of terrifying. (The concept of the rapture will haunt me even into adulthood, still somehow a presence in my mind, so that every once in a while when I make a few phone calls and no one answers, I wonder to myself if the rapture happened and I just haven’t been told yet.)

  Despite these details, which only seem slightly off at the time, I embrace this religion with all the unquestioned devotion of a child raised on nothing else. At age five, I crawl into my mother’s lap, pressing my temple against her shoulder. I had a nightmare, which wasn’t uncommon for me. “How can I go to heaven?” I whisper. My mother thinks a moment, perhaps how to best word the salvation message for such a small child, then says, “Jesus is our savior and forgives our sins.” She prays with me and I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior and my mother gives me a tight, proud hug, burying her nose into my hair. She sighs with relief. “Now you’re born again,” she says, and that sounds very important. I believe what she believes and what my brother believes and what my church believes.

  My father, however, does not. He never is a part of the church, never sets foot on that compound soil. He takes advantage of my mother’s time away, though, and eventually leaves her for another woman, one of his mistresses, when I’m five. I don’t understand because I have never seen them fight. Not a single word, never a raised voice, not once a slammed door or a broken plate. It’s silent and abrupt. One day he’s there, then suddenly not. The unexpectedness startles me and hunkers down in my bones. It will sit there for decades, a physical reminder that they can leave at any moment. Don’t trust too much, never rely too deeply, they can leave at any time.

  I blame my mother, not for his leaving, but for the financial mess he leaves us in. My mother works endlessly, tirelessly. Her long hours mean that sometimes she comes home late, but always in time for dinner—even if dinner needs to be pushed back a few hours—because we eat together as a family, a small trio bent over our chicken or spaghetti dinner. Even as a child I’m aware that she works like this to keep us here in our comfortable home, and that we could’ve moved elsewhere and been fine—had more clothes or better cars or things we didn’t need but simply wanted—but these schools are the best in the county and she’s determined to give us that. And still I blame her, unfairly, because if she hadn’t depended on a man, this never would have happened.

  I’ll never be like you, I think, criticizing her for having once relied on my father to keep her stable. I’ll go to college, I think, which is something my mother didn’t get to finish at the time. I’ll travel the world, I promise, which neither she nor my father ever did. I’ll make my own money, I swear, and I internalize that oath until it’s scored into my bones and I live my life dedicated to that one promise: I will rely on no one, I will be self-sufficient, no man will ever leave me desolate. This will keep me safe.

  Meanwhile my mother swallows her grief whole, buries it deep down in her stomach and pushes onward. I remember only one time when she cries. At the beginning of the divorce, we live in a space of “not anymore,” of small changes to our daily lives as certain things no longer happen. Daddy’s not coming home anymore. When I answer the phone, I no longer need to say “North American White Water Rafting,” because my father’s business has followed him out the door and into another home. One morning my brother comes into my room. He recognizes my mother’s sadness more than I do, maybe because he has two years on me. “It’s Mom’s anniversary,” he says. “We should give her presents. It’ll make her happy.”

  I don’t know what an anniversary is, but I do want to make her happy so I search through the trinkets in my room, discarding this or that, until I come across one of my prized possessions. It’s a glass unicorn head that sits on a wooden platform, a tiny lightbulb inside the base, filling the head with shifting colors of light. It’s magical and would make anyone happy.

  We softly tread down the carpeted steps. My mom’s bedroom door is open a crack but the room is still dark. My brother stands by her head and holds out a letter made of construction paper. “Happy anniversary,” he says faintly.

  She shifts under the heavy blankets and peeks out. Her face is white in the darkness. Slowly, as if it takes great effort, she sits up in the bed, her dark hair obscuring her face. “Thank you, baby,” she says, but her voice is both low and harsh.

  “This is for you!” I say, my din in contrast with my brother’s quiet. I thrust the unicorn head and base into her hands. She turns it over and maybe she smiles.

  “Thank you,” she says again. She sits there for a moment, the unicorn sinking into her lap “But we don’t have to celebrate this day anymore.” This is another end, another “not anymore,” and while I don’t understand the why, exactly, I do know it involves my father in some way, and that like many things now, this day is to be packaged up and placed to the side, best forgotten or untouched. I follow my mother’s silent example; I learn to compartmentalize well, to physically move on, to follow through with the necessary motions of daily life, even when emotionally I just want to dwell.

  The divorce fractures my parents, but it winds my brother and me closer to my mom. She becomes our permanent structure, the measure of authority, the home of kindness. She plays the roles of mother and father equally well. She calls our family the Three Musketeers, and it’s true enough. If she rages about my father’s infidelity, or the unfairness of being left to raise two children alone, she hides it well. She never once says an unkind word about my father. “He loves you the best way he knows how,” she often repeats when he forgets to call that day, or doesn’t end up visiting when he said he would. But after my father is gone she doubles down on church life, bringing us more often to the compound, and the women flock around her, shouldering up the extra childcare hours, the house duties. I’m surrounded by a village of women, but despite all this love here, I’m still just a little girl who wants nothing more than her dad.

  Even after he leaves, however, my father remains an indomitable force in my life. He’s not there for all the school meetings or the homework or the chores and the discipline, but he’s there for some weekends, for hiking and white-water rafting and skiing, snowmobiling and ATVing, for mountain climb
ing and rappelling off the edges of rock faces, for laughing across bonfires in the dark of a cool Maine night. In my memories I am forever running after him on tiny legs, stumbling over rocks as I try to keep up, try to stick to his side, but I’m somehow continuously just a little bit behind. He talks about what he wants, directs each conversation to his preference, and I have to repeat myself, lean forward, break in, and even so I remain unheard, my voice an afterthought, white noise in the periphery.

  My father is the rugged outdoorsman, the charismatic carpenter, the hard worker with large, callused hands and perpetually sun-scorched skin. I have his love but not his attention. He is more god than man, and just as unreachable.

  “God is in the trees,” he says one night when I’m ten, staring out at mountain landscape, his breath escaping in a hot, white cloud around his face. He holds a beer in his hand. His sweater sleeves are rolled up, despite the cold winter air. He’s drunk. I don’t mind. I stare out at the snow-laden trees, their branches bowing beneath the wet weight. “God’s not in some church, he’s out there.” He gestures to the wild, to the night and the stars, rejecting my traditional deity, my mother’s god. I find the concept intriguing, a small heralding of my father’s Mi’kmaq Native American ancestry, and I like that very idea of pressing against my boxed version of God, of examining it from different sides and angles, even if I won’t appreciate the potency of his words for decades to come.

  We parry back and forth, our first real exchange, rebuilding the concept of nature gods, his normally ruddy face deepened from the beer, one work-worn palm braced against the porch banister. I don’t mind that he drinks, because we have this, these moments when he can see me, speak to me, as if I’m a permanent fixture and I don’t have to strain my voice so deeply, I don’t have to yell, “Dad. Dad! Peter!” to get him to turn briefly in my direction.

  * * *

  When I’m eleven my mother leaves the cult. As a child, I don’t understand why. All I know is that I’m being dragged from the compound I grew up calling home, severed from the other kids I love like family, and that it’s all final and deafening. She’ll tell me much later that it wasn’t one single event, but instead an accumulation of things. She woke each morning sick with anxiety—dread over the long Bible studies, of striving to match the version of herself that the Matriarch demanded she be, of meeting this unobtainable status of the perfect Christian. It all leaves her stomach perpetually coiled in knots. She no longer experienced the happiness she had once found in God. She lost her joy.

  The church does not want to let her go. They bring the children to my mother’s door, the whole tribe standing out on the lawn as we kids cling to each other, wailing. The compound kids are homeschooled, which means our paths can’t cross even at school. “You won’t get to see each other again,” they say. “Say goodbye,” they order.

  Other mothers look on with angry, accusatory eyes. “Why are you doing this to them,” one of them asks my mom, who stands on our red-brick steps, one hand firmly planted on the door frame. “Why are you breaking them apart?”

  I turn in the arms of one of the girls, Lizzy, who has been practically a sister to me, tears dribbling off my chin. “Why?” I keen, my voice quivering, my arms tightening around Lizzy’s neck, cheek pressed against her soft brown hair.

  If my mother gives an answer, I don’t remember. I see her standing there, unyielding under this sudden assault, her head hung forward. She doesn’t move from her stronghold at the door. I think then that it is stubbornness. It doesn’t occur to me that she needs the frame to hold herself up. It takes me years to realize the strength it must have taken, to make such a stand against a church she once loved, a church that has so consumed her life that it has fractured outside friendships, weakened family bonds until she had very little outside those compound walls. Leaving must have been like another divorce. She bears it with a kind of strength and elegance that I don’t recognize then, but will later. How heartrending it must have been to lose her two great loves.

  There will be other churches, however. Other friends to be made between sermons and church pews. My mother remarries, to a Texan mechanic with a loud, instantaneous laugh and warm, kind eyes. Together they eventually find a new church, where I pray and study and serve.

  Event Horizon

  By thirteen I’ve grown restless. My nose points northward; something wild calls me, propels me forward. I’ll call this the Dostie Curse, a disquiet I’ve inherited from my father. It vibrates under the skin, rattles inside the rib cage, an incessant need that has no name. Stillness bores. Mediocrity is terrifying. Domesticity is cancer. It’s not so much an ambition as a compulsion, a consuming want to see more, do more, be there and not here, and sometimes I get it, how hard it must have been for my father, confined by the four walls of marriage in a small town in Connecticut.

  So at our new church, a nondenominational sect that is wholly nondescript, I find myself volunteering to travel to Russia for a missionary trip, arm stretched high overhead when the pastor asks which teens want to go. I barely make the age requirement. I don’t feel young, though: I need to move, to push out for no deeper reason than to flee normalcy. And I do, raising the money for the trip through babysitting and car washes and yard work, eventually rolling into St. Petersburg just three years after the Iron Curtain falls. In Russia I befriend other teenage churchgoers, determined to forever change the world in a way only a thirteen-year-old can imagine. At the time, I envision a spread of Christianity, a spiritual saving of humanity and my single hand in the movement, although the truth is I’m simply enthralled by the history and culture of another place, and really, deep down, in love with this feeling I’m nurturing of being different from everyone else. I need to be extraordinary.

  I get my first taste of international life in Russia, my first exuberant life experience as I fall in love with a beautiful Russian man who is almost a decade my senior. I love him in that tiny, early-teen kind of love, consuming and brilliant and fast, leaving me feeling altered, like nothing will ever be the same, when really it is only a two-week encounter, where he does nothing more than linger with his lips against my cheeks, because I’ve been told sex is only for after marriage and never, ever for before. We write long, poetic letters to each other after I head back to the US, and then he joins the Russian army and ships out to Siberia, which I find terribly brave and foreign. I promptly forget about him when the letters stop.

  The summers I am fifteen and sixteen I spend in Haiti, with yet another new church, a predominantly African American Pentecostal ministry. We build churches and pass out food and clothes to the poor, and I am intrigued by the diversity of the world yet abhor the Haitian heat, the way the sweat sticks to my body and slithers down my skin. I eat goat, and ants, and clams straight from the ocean, the flesh squirming in my mouth as I clamp my teeth down on their slippery, salty meat. I travel with my church’s youth group, with my on-and-off-again boyfriend, a Will Smith look-alike with eyes so brown they appear orange in the sunlight. This love, too, feels earth-shattering; I love him with my whole teenage being, as if our love were the entire world.

  We sneak kisses in church closets, in dark hallways between youth group meetings, never too much more, because he reminds me, “This is wrong,” with his thumb brushing against my chin, his hand cradling the back of my head, the other wrapped around my waist. I press up against him in that tiny closet, the door slightly ajar, light peeking in from the church kitchen. My foot knocks a broom and the wood handle slides to the side with a loud clack. I startle, glancing out through the sliver of light, but no one hears us. I remind myself that this feeling is the desire of the flesh, spiritually harmful, but I am flushed, heart pounding, and I want, I want, and I’m not supposed to want. Sex is for marriage and this sort of play is sinful, detrimental to my relationship with God. I press my forehead against his chest, with a sigh trying to shut back the feelings, the pulsing from deep inside my body. I can’t, not really.

  I grow roots in this
Pentecostal youth group. I become a worship team singer, a Prayer Warrior, a leader in the group. There’s a hierarchy here but I don’t mind because I’m at the top. My friendships are established here in this youth church and I take my Christianity seriously, attending youth events like Acquire the Fire, headlining See You at the Flagpole at my school, being the first to open a Bible study club at both my middle and high school. One summer I travel the coast with our youth group band, singing for churches from Connecticut to Florida. Yet none of this is strong enough to tie me to Connecticut. I’m still itching to go, to get out, even though I don’t know what out means.

  At sixteen I ask my mother if I can study abroad in Japan for a year. Thanks to a closeted obsession with anime and manga, I’ve fallen for the language, dazzled by its sheer distinctiveness from Spanish or French or German or Italian, the only other languages offered at our school. I attend after-school Yale University courses for it; I join two Japanese-language summer camps at Central Connecticut State University because I’m determined to become fluent. I excitedly hand my mom pamphlets and flyers, hopping from one foot to the other. She looks down at them and gives a soft, deflated sigh. She hesitates, the words heavy in her mouth. “We can’t afford this, Ryan,” she says. Most trips cost at least six thousand dollars, which isn’t something a Subaru service manager can afford.