Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

“Better treat my sister good,” she said.

  “I’ve learned this about Johnston women,” he said, out of breath from his energetic champagne-fueled dance moves. “You better not cross ’em, and you better not tell ’em no.”

  “Such wisdom in one so young.”

  And yet men had told Annie no with some regularity in her life.

  “You’re still here!” Jerilyn said, falling into the chair next to her, wedding dress still starchy and crackling.

  “What time is it?” Annie scanned the wall for a clock. “Shouldn’t you be en route to the Honeymoon Suite?”

  “Skip wants to make sure the Zipper—uh, the Zeta Pis all get into cabs instead of drive.”

  “I got to hand it to Mom,” Annie admitted. “That was the best functioning, most beautiful wedding imaginable. Jerene Johnston can deliver the goods.”

  Jerilyn nearly teared up. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? I’ll never be Mom, though, no matter how hard I work at it.”

  “Hey, go upstairs and start having some children with Skip and in twenty years’ time, and a lot more practice, you’ll be better than Mom, when it comes time to micromanage your daughter’s wedding.”

  “Did it make you a little sad, Annie, to…” Jerilyn thought better of the question; it showed in her face.

  “What?”

  “I mean, not to have had a big house wedding with the full deluxe Mom treatment.”

  “Actually, I’d have died with this much attention, everyone whispering about how fat the bride was. No, I’m glad they never did this kind of thing for me so they could spend twice as much on you. You, Jerry, are the perfect, beautiful bride. You are worthy of such a beautiful wedding.”

  Annie never said nice things so it had much more force than the last hundred well-wishers who had told Jerilyn how beautiful she was on this special day. Jerilyn let a tear escape. “I’m glad I got to do it at home. Mom said she wanted it to be the last thing people remember about the house.”

  Annie smiled because she didn’t understand what Jerilyn meant. Why would it be the last thing … “Are Mom and Dad thinking of selling our house?”

  Jerilyn looked a little startled. Had she said something not intended for Annie’s ears? “Um, I don’t know. I mean, Mom and Dad, now that we’re all older and out of the house, are, I think, going to sell it one day.”

  That was as a blow. Sell Great-grandfather Joseph Johnston’s hundred-plus-year-old mansion on the hill, the house they built Myers Park around? Of course, Annie would put a stop to it. Maybe she would buy it from them, through an anonymous third party, and make a show of giving it back to them. Maybe she would move into it herself. Then it suddenly made sense. Of course they would sell it. How else would her parents live with her father not working? The thought of her childhood home being sold … “Any idea when they might sell it?” Annie asked lightly, so as not to scare Jerilyn off the topic.

  “I guess when that housing development is finished. You know, the one near the trestle that Dad is working on with those investors. They’re going to move into a unit there. Can I ask you a question?”

  Visiting Mom and Dad at some gated community, lily-white golfing condo, just over the South Carolina state line—just great.

  “Annie, do you really like sex?”

  Annie nearly knocked over her mixed drink. “Sex. Well, yes I really do like it. It will surprise most of your sorority sisters over yonder to learn that there is a taste for big girls out there and some of those admiring men are mighty adept in the sack.”

  “You’ve always been popular, big or small,” she said, reaching across the litter of wedding party favors and ruins of snack plates, and patting Annie’s hand. “I don’t much like it,” she went on, clearly tipsy.

  “Uh-oh. Maybe you shouldn’t have married Skip if, um—”

  “Oh it’s better with him than anyone. We go so far back, known each other for so long that … anyway, it seems more natural with Skip. But still. Not crazy about it.”

  Poor girl. Nothing but Carolina frat boys flailing away on her, after gallons of Rolling Rock. “Sex is like coffee. People are lying to say they like it at first, but in time, it grows on you—”

  Then suddenly Skip and two frat brothers swept down on Jerilyn who was lifted from her chair and was carried squealing to the dance floor for the DJ’s long-awaited playing of EMF’s “Unbelievable,” some kind of Zeta Pi unofficial anthem.

  Annie decided to make a discreet exit. By way of the bathroom.

  While she was in there, a new crew of sorority sisters took up positions at the mirror, all high-gloss Southern girls in their twenties, fat-free, thin-waisted, beautiful swan necks and glimmering expensive salon hair. They were tired, drunk, exhausted, danced-out good-time girls but they still looked amazing, if somewhat artificial. Annie stared at herself critically. I’m just ten or so years older than these party girls, she thought, but my face sags like a forty-year-old; I will have this double chin accompanying me to the grave. Annie had a good man, a man’s man, a macho Marlboro NASCAR-loving, work-boot-wearing, construction-worker stud of a man, while these bitches went home to the frat boys they lassooed at Carolina (wearing checkered golf pants and yellow sports coats, breathing booze-breath on everyone at the country club by eleven A.M.), and she had it all over them. But funny how having a first-rate fellow waiting for her down on the Banks didn’t make these self-assessments optional, or any kinder.

  She opened her clutch and found her lipstick. She thought about Michael from college who hadn’t been heard from or seen in fifteen years. She looked forward to this week’s meetings with Bob, Zack, Tony, and Jim, each encounter moving her a little closer to an exciting affair. Nope, Annie—Jeannette Jerene Johnston Costa Winchell Arbuthnot—was not so good at marriage. Not good in the least.

  Bo

  He assumed, some future day, he would be good with his own children (if he and Kate had some) but he wasn’t good with other people’s children. When he picked up infants at the church nursery, they began screaming until a woman—any woman, apparently—took the child away from Reverend Johnston. Toddlers and teenagers, pretty much the same response. Must be the preacher’s collar, which he had taken to not wearing. He was already (reportedly) too serious, too stiff, and the dour preacherman uniform made it worse. His wife Kate connected with newborns in an instant, had them gurgling and smiling. Kate who swore she didn’t even want children, naturally, a natural.

  Another group of people he did badly with: older white men. He couldn’t talk sports or stock cars, what Rush or Fox News said, Republican rants and ravings; they sensed some insufficient masculine gene in him, something soft and left-leaning. Kate could charm some of the old men, but the elders in their church were professionally mean, vinegar in their blood, quarrelers, grumblers, conspirators, assassins …

  Older white women he did well with. Bo was a true Southern boy that way—always polite, respectful, listening patiently to endless twaddle and tedium, gardening and Circle gossip, catalogues of bodily ailments, explicated photos of grandchildren.

  Another group Bo was ashamed to admit he was clumsy with: African-Americans. He felt white-guilty around them. There were very few black students at Mecklenburg Country Day (not even for the imagined boon to the sports teams), few blacks in his hall at Duke University. Durham was a mostly black city, yet the citizens beyond the granite walls might as well, for all Bo interacted with them, have been living behind the Iron Curtain. No blacks in his seminary class at Davidson College, no blacks in his church congregation.

  When out shopping or dining in Charlotte, he saw how integrated Charlotte had become: sports-bar gangs of thirty-something men watching the Panthers lose, black, white, Latin, mixed-race, the Sikh guy in the turban, the Asian guy with the Southern accent, friends from work or school or some softball league. He envied them. Being natural around black people required there being some black people to practice on, run into, socialize with, and his world had denied him this. There was the c
leaning staff at the church. As with Alma, the domestic he grew up with, he was a little suspicious of all that smiling and politeness, all those yes, Reverends. He felt quietly judged by black people, even the nice ones, and furthermore, given the history of the South, he thought they were entitled. Now Katie—good Lord, she was at ease with everyone!

  Maybe if he had been more socially adept he would never have landed them at Stallings Presbyterian. The Charlotte Presbytery was dominated by Zephora Hainey, one of those charismatic black ladies of the Oprah template, buxom, alert, clairvoyant when dealing with people, gathering your thoughts for you before you knew what your thoughts were. In his mind, she was ten feet tall, but in reality he was a head taller than she was, Zephora, this incarnation of womanly Christian goodness.

  “That Stallings church needs to be bulldozed under the sod, and the earth needs to be salted,” she said without pretense, before a bit of black preachin’ from Job: “The rabble rise, they cast up against me their waaaays of destruction.”

  “Why doesn’t the presbytery just shut it down?”

  “Now Reverend Johnston,” she said, taking his arm, leading him into the garden of the Presbyterian church office, trimmed hedges of yellowing holly in an ivy patch, markedly unambitious. “We’re in the business of helping and saving Presbyterian churches, not boarding them up. And if you look at our numbers, there are plenty of churches being boarded up without the presbytery going down there with our own hammer and nails. I don’t have to tell you how the mainline denominations are fading away in this country, along with quilt-making and darning socks.”

  Stallings Presbyterian was short a preacher and, as in all Presbyterian churches, the congregation would decide on their own hiring, but Dr. Hainey had put his name in play, made a visit or two to some of the more reasonable ladies on the search committee and, as she knew he would, he became their leading candidate. But oh dear God, Bo thought, Stallings, N.C., and that beleaguered church …

  Stallings was a rural satellite of Charlotte, right over the Mecklenburg County line, for whatever tax relief and social difference that afforded. There were still big swaths of farmland through its unaccountably serpentine town limits. Stallings in the 1970s became a middle-class suburb—ranch houses with lawns, young married folk fixing up farmhouses, storefront day cares and corner groceries, still more trees than asphalt. Then came the gated communities, the golf course, the built-overnight shopping center with the trendy food store. Carnivorous Charlotte kept growing toward Union County, panting down Stallings’s neck with a poorer mix, mobile-home parks, Hispanic enclaves with tiendas and check-cashing services with signs in Spanish. In the midst of all this change and upgrade was a core of rural, conservative whites who had a last redoubt in Stallings Presbyterian Church.

  Bo would privately tell trusted friends that Christianity in Charlotte possessed the aesthetics of the monster truck show at the Coliseum. Home of the mega-church, the auditorium churches with ten thousand–plus congregations, their endless splitting and walkouts and cabals and firings and lawsuits. The TV ministries, harkening back to native son Billy Graham and the altar call, Heritage Village and its religion-friendly amusement park (six million visitors a year!), the enjoyable rise and fall of Praise the Lord Club “evangelebrities,” Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Bo smiled remembering that, as children, after they got home from church they raced to tune in the Bakkers’ first TV effort, The Jim and Tammy Show, an evangelical puppet show out of Pat Robertson’s TV mill of mediocrity, on … was it Channel 9? Bo and Annie would roll on the floor howling at the original songs screeched out by Tammy Faye, the pig puppet made out of a shampoo bottle, all urging the boys and girls on to Jesus!

  “Are you children on the floor in your Sunday clothes?” their mother would cry, once discovered. “What in God’s name are you watching? Oh not these people again!”

  Do you ever suppose even one human came to confess Jesus Christ as his or her Lord and Savior because of the pig puppet and Tammy Faye’s atonal warble? Bo wondered if that soul was one more soul than he had led to Christ.

  “So you’ll go down into Babylon for me?” Zephora was saying. “You have a sober manner, which will appeal to the conservatives, but you are progressive and loving at heart, which will become known to the more liberal element and make them happy.”

  “I’m not sure even God,” said Bo, half-smiling, “could make Stallings Presbyterian ‘happy.’ I’ll settle for civil.”

  The 1990s saw a wave of mainline church discontent. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, all the Protestant denominations began losing trade to the big mega-churches with their razzle-dazzle TV broadcasts, more showbiz and holiday pageants, dynamic preachers with altar calls. Well, that wasn’t how Presbyterians did things anyway, but Stallings Prez started to feel stodgy to itself, and many of the congregation wanted a more active, charismatic faith.

  And then Dr. Frankling, the grand old veteran minister, a year from retirement, became born-again. Oh he thought he had been born-again earlier, but that was a dry intellectual decision, not transcendence, not God’s own grace descending upon him and bowling him over. And everything changed after that. Services were more charismatic and Dr. Frankling burst into tongues when he got excited in the pulpit. Sick people were now brought to the aisles for a laying on of hands. His sermons revolved around gifts of the spirit, and a small group of men and women met with him at his house, and word drifted back that things were transpiring. Fits and seizures, transports, all-night prayer sessions in which John and Marla Rheinhart claimed to see Jesus in the room. And then one heard about the time that Satan himself tried to interrupt the proceedings and Dr. Frankling, on way too little sleep, had them running around his house stopping drains and faucets—because that’s how Satan would enter—shoving towels under cracks of doorways, taping the windows shut. You would have thought when they all came to their senses the next morning that would have occasioned some reflection but it didn’t. And after the elders and deacons (some of whom were in this faction) talked it out, they decided that Dr. Frankling maybe better retire a year early and remain a great friend and congregant of the church. But he took it as an insult and left for True Vine Pentecostal where gifts of the spirit were encouraged. His last letter to the elders had been forwarded to the Presbytery and Dr. Hainey kept it in her files. So Bo got to read it.

  You poor dead Presbyterians, he wrote them. God has come calling and you will not answer; you have closed your hearts to the true revelation. You imagine yourselves shielded against His power with your purses and wallets, your small affordable charities, which avail you of nothing. I must go where I can preach Christ Jesus, active, enflaming, alive in the hearts of believers, not just on Sunday for a few diverting hours before the auto race or NFL game. And it went on like that, and he decamped to True Vine and some members of the church went with him, including two deacons.

  So that was Part One of the schism; Part Two was when the synod decided, after these Baptist antics, that an old-line interim minister was just what Stallings needed.

  “Brother Bo, that was before my time of service here,” Zephora said, her lips pursed. “I would never have sent Fire ’n’ Brimstone Brenner to Stallings, no sir.”

  Dr. Brenner was some of that ol’-time religion, John Knox back from the grave. His sermons were strong, forceful, absolutely not up for discussion in any way, shape, or form because he was right, and he was insuperably right because he had God and Scripture on his side. Then it came out that the effeminate organist (who everyone thought was a closeted gay man with a bad silver toupee) was having a thing with a married soprano. Aside from the improbable visual of lovely Mrs. Hinton having an affair with Mr. Todd, there was a sense that something had to be said or done. The old unexcitable faction (who had not liked the speaking in tongues of Dr. Frankling) felt the adulterous couple should be informed that the congregation knew their secret, told to quit it, told to get counseling. The elders were determined that “in all things love,” that
a Christian, gentle solution might be found to patch up her marriage and return things to normal.

  But Dr. Brenner had other plans and one Sunday called them out before the entire late-service congregation, which, of course, may have been in keeping with practices in the early church (as were sackcloth and ashes), but it had the effect of a stoning. He declared that they renounce each other and their sin on the spot, or leave the church never to return. They left. The organist sued for breach of contract, since there was no morals clause in his contract, as in the minister’s and choir director’s contracts. Half the congregation thought Dr. Brenner was wrong to do it; a quarter thought he was wrong to do it publicly but was right otherwise; and a quarter saw Dr. Brenner as the righteous branch that would spring forth to execute justice and righteousness in the land.

  And then Stallings Prez started fighting over every little thing. Some younger members in the congregation wanted newer music as long as they were hiring a new organist. Synthesizers, guitars, miked singing—something the other churches were doing (well, the ones on TV), not that dreary old dirgey classical music all the time. They fought about who got to teach Sunday school. Lucille Gerster had given the kids nightmares with all her talk of hell to the second graders, but to remove her would mean World War III. (She had been in the tongues-speaking camp, and was still seething over Dr. Frankling’s exile.) The church fought over their decade-long support of the Five Churches Soup Kitchen—didn’t it seem they were paying the lion’s share? And besides, is it really Christian to let these broken men get dependent on these handouts? And then one Sunday when Dr. Brenner asked if there were any concerns or requests for prayers in the congregation, Hedda and Leroy Hargett stood up and said that two blocks from their house, there was a Planned Parenthood family center going up and the staff would be counseling, if not actually performing, abortions there.

  The church, on this one, could not agree to disagree: this was baby-murder right in their midst. Each controversy took its toll and people too liberal for the Neanderthal element in the church and people too conservative for this socialist bleeding-heart outpost began to find other congregations. The ones who stayed behind weren’t going anywhere. They were committed to the fight for the life and soul of Stallings Presbyterian. But Bo had longed for service, and this was truly service. To save a schismatic, polarized church which had lost its Christian fellowship.