Randy, who was Ali’s age, stood alone, smoking on the margins in his black Levis, Calvin Klein T-shirt and sunglasses. He looked dangerous and tragic—a maltreated stray that might turn on you if you tried to pat it. But after a few minutes, Ali took a deep breath and marched over to speak with him. I watched in admiration as she approached him in her black chiffon sundress, flinging her gold hair over a shoulder. He reached to take her outstretched hand. I couldn’t hear what they said, but I saw him push his dark glasses to the top of his head, toss his cigarette into the dirt. Apparently, Ali alone knew how to reach this boy. By the end of the service, they were embracing.
But a few weeks later, Alison had deserted us all for boarding school. The rest of us left the bright little tract house in Danville for a hulking split-level in the charred foothills one development over. This second house had six bedrooms and still stank of cigarettes from the previous owners, who’d been so spooked by the fires they fled to Seattle. This new town was called Alamo, and as we moved our things out of the U-Haul, once again lugging boxes through doorways and up stairs, I kept thinking of the famous Texas battle, parched soldiers hiding out in ditches, bodies strewn about.
“Isn’t the Alamo where everybody got killed?” I asked Mr. Robert as he helped Lisa carry her bed into a downstairs room. “Isn’t that where everybody got slaughtered?”
“Yes, but they held out for a good long time before it was over,” he said, dropping the mattress on the floor with a thud. “Where do you want this thing, Lisa?”
Lisa shrugged and pointed to the darkest corner of the room. We would be neighbors now, inhabiting adjacent rooms in the cellar, our exhausted, newlywed parents above us. Lisa and I would share a bathroom, a hall closet and a phone jack, so I watched her closely. Her round, black eyes reminded me of Darian Woods’s, and she had the habit of placing her well-manicured fingers over her lips, muffling her voice. Once or twice that day, I caught her staring fiercely at my mother’s back. I decided I liked her, though she was odd and acted younger than her nineteen years. Unlike Randy, Lisa seemed to understand that humor was needed; she kept surprising me with well-timed witticisms, spoken from behind her pink hand. She called us the Bradys from Hell and poked fun at the tacky decor while her brother stormed through the hallways, stoned and furious, kicking at boxes. I knew just how he felt, but I wished he wouldn’t take it out on the rest of us. When I tried to make friends by carrying a crate of record albums into his room, he accosted me on the steps, grabbing it from my arms.
“Keep your hands off my stuff.” I smelled the familiar tang of alcohol and backed away. He was already losing his hair in front. “Got it, Saliva, or whatever the hell your name is?”
After that, I stayed out of Randy’s way. It wasn’t hard to do, since he was usually locked in his room, listening to Aerosmith and Kiss. I wondered how long it would take Mom to figure out that her stepson was smoking pot all day. The sultry odor seeped into the hall no matter how many towels he stuffed under his door. Lisa, on the other hand, was almost never in her room. She sat on the family room sofa from breakfast until bedtime, eating Doritos and Cheez Whiz, watching talk shows and circling employment ads in the newspaper.
A few weeks after our move, it occurred to me that Mom and Mr. Robert were rarely home anymore. He was working longer hours all of a sudden. My mother had joined the ladies’ golf league, was singing in the choir and volunteering on three committees at our new church. I knew what she was up to, and often asked if I could accompany her to the ugly brick building in Pleasant Hill. While she practiced choral arrangements or sat through committee meetings, I wandered the playing fields out back, the dilapidated classrooms of Pleasant Hill Adventist Academy, where I’d soon be starting eighth grade.
Eventually I found myself wandering down the middle aisle of the church sanctuary, sitting in an empty front pew and staring up at the massive face of the Savior. He looked benign enough, although there was something missing—a certain empathy or pain. This wasn’t the bloody, tortured Jesus of the crucifixion, who’d presided at our old church in Tustin. This was the post-resurrection Jesus. He’d been through it all, and had the mellow, self-satisfied look of the immortal. With His gauzy robes and sun-streaked hair, He seemed almost complacent, and I wondered if He could see me from the sanctuary of His Father’s kingdom. I wondered if He could hear me when I prayed to Him each night, after Mom had left my room.
She always said she just wanted to tuck me in, but once she’d shut the door and sat on the edge of my bed, she’d start to cry.
“I don’t know what to do.” She’d squeeze my hand in her thin fingers. “I don’t know where to turn.” I strained my mind for the perfect advice, trying for an expression that would ease her pain. She talked about her ambivalence toward Mr. Robert’s children, her hatred of this new house. She missed Alison and Sammy and, yes, my father. She missed all their old ways. She even missed his anger, God help her. If only they’d found a way to work things out. If only she could have saved him; if he hadn’t been so rash. She didn’t know this man she’d married, and she thought about leaving, finding a place closer to Gram and Poppy’s, just the two of us…. But she always came around, resolving to stick it out, make the best of the life she’d made.
“I couldn’t bear the scandal of a divorce, now, on top of everything else,” she said one night, and I felt my heart curl up and retreat, like a marsupial seeking darkness and shelter. Then she wiped her nose across the back of her hand and I was startled by a desire to slap her—my fingers vibrated with it. I nodded as she talked, hugging my own arms to avoid doing any more harm, pretending to listen.
That night, I dreamed that Jesus was approaching in the eastern sky and I was on a beach, all tangled up in the damp sand with my sister’s old boyfriend, Leslie Brown, his big hand rummaging between my legs. Just as I was about to come, I heard the heavens cracking open and looked up at the tumultuous, bright sky. Jesus’s disappointed face shone down from the fist-shaped cloud. Then a tidal wave conveniently towered up—immense and shining—to smother our misconduct. I woke with my heart thudding in the darkness, my nightshirt sticky. Unable to fall back asleep, I wandered the house until dawn, taking in the new smells, the odd shapes, the eerie feeling of other dreams being dreamed so near—stranger’s dreams.
“He will come like a thief in the night,” Pastor Trumble assured us. “And all but the most devout will be surprised at His coming. Two of you will be sitting side by side, and only one will be taken. The other will be left behind….”
I sat in our second-row pew with Mom, trying not to notice the mulchy brown stare, long hands and shapely ass of Russell Schmoll, the tenth-grader who played the organ.
“All but the most faithful will beg the rocks to fall upon them, to cover their utter wickedness,” droned the pastor. “But the righteous—” Here he opened his arms to include those of us in the front pews. “The righteous will rejoice in the utter certainty of their faith!”
I started to watch and wait. I wrote down everything I ate and fasted on Fridays. After church, Mom and I always drove to Orchard Hill, and while Mom and Gram prepared lunch in the cool kitchen, while Poppy watered his garden, I’d stand on the edge of their wide front lawn, trying to picture Christ’s coming. I’d pick a cloud on the horizon—maybe that dark fisted one hovering over Alamo. Yes, that could be it, hanging silent above my own neighborhood. I needed to see that cloud, His hands reaching forward, that perfect, paternal smile. But whenever I came close to imagining it, I just felt tiny and afraid. Standing for hours in my disappointment and yearning, I knew I was a sinner of the worst order—a masturbator, a conspirator, a she-devil of a girl. Jesus would pass right by as if I were simply a smudge on the otherwise perfect lawn. I needed to muster up the appropriate exuberance. I needed to focus. But I grew weary of the task; my eye was drawn down from the heavens to that ghostly water tower, or the silver-black ribbon of fire road that strung together two knotty oak groves. I started wondering what shade
s I would mix to conjure the bleached amber hillside, and whether I’d use a brush or palette knife to capture the exact texture of the field.
“What in the world are you doing out there?” Mom called. “Why don’t you come eat?” So I went. Once again, I’d been lured from my vigil by the smell of lasagna, the familiar sounds of my grandparents’ voices, the beauties of the earth. I was fleshy, after all, unfit for redemption.
School started, and I went to Bible class every morning at Pleasant Hill Adventist Academy, where Mr. Marks talked about the joys of baptism by immersion. I’d seen this a few times—the robed believers springing from the water, cradled in the preacher’s arms, conviction sparkling on their cheeks. Walking to the girls’ bathroom after class one day, my Bible pressed to my breasts, I knew what I must do. If I couldn’t be cleansed by fire, I’d be purified by water. I imagined emerging from the baptismal, absolved and full of confidence—my transgressions washed away like stubborn stains in a detergent commercial.
My mother took me for weekly counseling sessions with Pastor Trumble, who warned me of the dangers of adolescence. “The temptation of the flesh is strong,” he said, massaging his knee with his chubby hand. “But you must resist, and study your New Testament, and keep yourself pure in the eyes of God, no matter what your peers are urging you to do. Are they urging you?” he asked a little too eagerly. I told him not to worry, that my sins had little to do with people my own age.
In the car on the way home, I quoted whole passages from memory—The Beatitudes, The Lord’s Prayer, The Ten Commandments, The Twenty-third Psalm.
“Randy was arrested for drunk driving last night,” Mom told me. “We’ll have to pay a stiff fine, and Bob and I now have to drive him everywhere.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I offered, “but we shouldn’t judge him. Especially since he just lost his mother. Jesus says in the New Testament that—”
“I know, Sylvie. It’s just hard. Bob’s talking about sending him to his grandma in Eugene and I feel so guilty, but—if I’d known things were going to turn out this way…” She sighed.
“Everything will work out for the best, if you give it to the Lord,” I tried. ‘“But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.”’
“I suppose that’s true. That’s from the Psalms or something, isn’t it?”
“Luke 12:31,” I said, turning my face away.
I believed, during those first few months of the school year, that being baptized would take away my aversion toward my new family. It would erase the stinging rage I felt around my mother, the horror and guilt about my father, the grief that often smothered my senses like a layer of damp wool. Maybe it would even mend this ache between the two halves of my rib cage—some days, it felt like God himself had slid a silver knife into my breast, splitting me in two. Baptism would fix all that, I knew. I imagined that everything would be brighter, after I emerged, cleaner, more whole. I would gasp with wonder and gratitude, like Dorothy emerging from her dingy, beaten house and stepping into the colorful landscape of Oz.
Instead, I came out of the baptismal coughing, having gotten some of the sour, chlorine-rich water up my nose. Pastor Trumble slipped as he brought me to my feet and we stood clutching each other, waist deep in the chill water, tangled in his heavy, slick robes. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was not God’s face, but Pastor Trumble’s matted black nostril hairs and wide red chin as he stammered, “I’m sorry—I’m terribly sorry.”
I shivered all through the sermon that day—hair cold and slimy on the back of my neck, infection brewing in my left ear—smiling tightly when Mom whispered how proud she was, how grown-up I seemed, what a beautiful little lady. Russell Schmoll winked from behind the organ, so I stared right back. I couldn’t look at Pastor Trumble’s shiny face, or at the stained-glass Jesus receding behind him.
2004
I STILL HAVEN’T CALLED TAI BY THE TIME WE DRIVE home from Bradley Airport the day after Christmas. Then there’s the unpacking and the washing, the bills and recycling, the Christmas tree to disassemble. Nathan does what he can with one arm, but keeps bumping his cast and cursing, so I send him for groceries. Our plants are dying and the driveway hasn’t been shoveled. Through it all, I fight off the desire to call, like tamping down a stubborn brush fire at the base of my skull. Emmie requires help with her new train set and Hannah wants a chess partner. The fire creeps over my scalp, seizes my forehead, migrates to the troublesome tendons of my hands.
I wake up sweating in the middle of the first night, and the second, seeing his words—Eli’s enlisting…world flat without you—flash across the greenish expanse of my mind. I can’t go back to sleep and float through the house wraithlike, thoughts spiraling: I have destroyed all our chances for happiness…. On the third night, I hear my father’s distinctive nasal twang calling, “Now you’ve done it, sporto.” I whip around, tune in more closely, but there’s only silence. I remember the haunted string of nights following our wedding, how I woke Nathan at one-thirty, two and four-fifteen, my mind a flapping shutter of memory: how my new husband would force himself awake, hold me in the broken dawn and read the poems “Song of Myself” or “Sunday Morning” aloud for hours, until sleep claimed me or the shaking subsided. I want to go to him now, curl into his spoon, claim my sweet marital comfort—but it’s no longer mine.
Then the storm rolls in and Emmie’s the first to get the fever and sore throat that spreads to the rest of us by Sunday. The last four days of 2004, snow falls in thick white clumps the size of marshmallows—thirteen inches in all—and we’re marooned in the king-sized bed, the girls damp and dozing while I dole out Tylenol with crippled fingers.
The fever lifts but we aren’t well. We bump around the house exchanging tissues and grumpy condolences, playing in shifts with Emmie, who alone remains energetic and has overtaken the living room—now dubbed Fairy Land—with her train tracks and doll furniture and blocks. She invents a new game about a Wish Fairy, with the power to grant one all-consuming wish to each of us in turn. “My all-consuming wish,” Hannah finally moans, tossing herself on the sofa, “is never to play Wish Fairy again!”
When we can no longer abide dramatic play, the four of us settle down to family movies. Hannah has to repeat every movie two or three times, whether she likes it or not, and I’m uncomfortably reminded of myself, during the weeks after my botched baptism: despondency had set in, and I wandered the house in the same pair of powder-blue sweatpants for days, until Mr. Robert brought home a big-screen TV, a VCR and a stack of old movies. During Christmas break that year, he set everything up in the basement and proceeded to educate his patchwork family about cinema. His favorites were black-and-white films that featured Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. We teenagers crept from the dank solitude of our bedrooms to watch.
“What is this weird shit?” Ali asked about The Birds.
“Don’t you have anything more current, Dad?” asked Lisa.
“Is this supposed to be a horror flick?” Randy rasped.
Robert just laughed—a rarity those days—and said, “Grab a seat and shut up, would you? They don’t make movies like this anymore.” I eyed the new entertainment system suspiciously. I hated everything about that house. I hated how the rooms all seemed miles apart, how you could get lost in the hallways, how my mother avoided coming downstairs for fear of running into her stepchildren. But even she descended during the Cary Grant movies, taking her place beside me on the green basement couch.
I fell in love on that couch, with the Hepburns and Marilyn, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, Bogie and Bacall. For glorious hours, I’d lose myself in their dry wit and simple antics, the tight story lines with satisfying endings. For two weeks before life clanked back into place—before Alison returned to boarding school and I spun back into restless despair—I stayed on that couch, transported to a world without compromising scenarios and senseless tragedies. We’d watch together—some of us staying, some wanderi
ng off—laughing at the funny parts, sighing in unison. Every now and then, I could almost believe we were a family.
“We can’t keep on this way,” Tai says when I finally sneak out of the house to call him, in the midst of The Sound of Music. “I think we should probably just stop, Sylvia.”
I feel the air leave my body, as if I’ve been slugged hard below the ribs. It’s New Year’s Day and I’m the one who’s been poised to say this, mustering the shreds of my will. Now he’s stolen my line, and I feel cheated, chastised, bereft.
“Why?” I hear myself ask in a minuscule voice.
“Listen to what you’ve been saying.” He laughs bitterly. “You sound awful. You’ve lost fourteen pounds and you’re living on Advil. You can’t paint. Your marriage is crumbling.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, incredulous. “What did you think—that my marriage would be thriving right now? All it needed was a healthy dose of adultery?”
“It’s making you miserable,” he pronounces.
“So, now you’re the guardian of my happiness? Why didn’t you think of that before you started all this?” I’m shivering, and far enough from home to light my lone cigarette, pulling warm tatters of smoke into my lungs, which contract in protest and gratitude. “Are you blaming me for Eli’s wanting to enlist?”
“No,” he says. “I’m hoping he’ll snap out of it before his eighteenth birthday.”
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