Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  The woman testifying—except we don’t call it testifying, we call it sharing—is about fifty years old with wildly curly hair, conservative clothes, bright red lipstick, and simple gold jewelry. She looks like she smells good. She sits at the front of the room and tells one of those really human and inspiring stories that can make me believe in people or at least make me believe in stories. I look down at Jake’s hands. They’re the most gnarled hands I’ve ever seen—punished and cracked and stained. I take one of them in mine for a minute and it feels like an ancient piece of a tree, a mystical organic fossil that has weathered the elements for two thousand years. I listen to the end of the story, the readings, the clapping, and, finally, the praying. I tick off one more hour of paying my debt to I don’t know what. One more hour of trying, but not hard enough, probably.

  My stepbrother, Hunter, was the reason I got almost saved the first time. Hunter with the bony wrists and the constant Coca-Cola and the yellow dog hair all over his clothes. It was just as the summer ended the year I turned twelve. In the six years we’d been stepsiblings, we had gone from pitching tents in the backyard and riding our bikes through piles of dried leaves at the curb to playing Atari and listening to the Police in Hunter’s room. Hunter lived with his mom most of the time, but came to stay with us on the weekends.

  Hunter was effortlessly popular. Me, I was a head taller than everyone my own age and was only popular when it came to picking sports teams. I played center forward on the soccer team, pitcher on the baseball team. I was the eye of the hurricane. Everything spun around me, party games and school plays and playground soap operas, and I was the still center with nothing happening to me except I kept growing.

  I counted days between Hunter’s visits, when he would grudgingly show up with his duffel bag over his shoulder. He barely unpacked, except for the perfectly pressed church clothes he brought with him already on hangers. His church clothes were the only thing in his closet except for a few winter coats and my mother’s overeager photo albums of a new, ready-made family. No pictures of my father anywhere.

  One Saturday afternoon, Hunter came into the garage where I was peeling off my soggy shin guards after a soccer game. Hands in his pockets, he asked about the game and then, looking out the open garage door at the nothing special outside, he asked, “Do you want to go to church with me tomorrow?”

  I flushed hot to the edges of my hair, pulled tight off my face into two neat braids.

  “Do I have to do anything?”

  “No. No. Just come check it out. You’ll be surprised. You’ll have a good time.”

  And for a moment I heard the salesman in him, inherited from his father.

  After much wheedling and cajoling and finally a grudging assent from my mother, that Sunday I got dressed to attend Zion Pentecostal Church. I wore the only dress I had: navy, buttoned up the front, with a drop waist and puffy sleeves. I pulled on my white tights and stepped into my ballet flats and stood in front of the mirror feeling prim and shiny.

  I wanted a glimpse at the source of Hunter’s rare selfassurance. He knew something I didn’t and I was finally getting let in on the secret. Mom tentatively knocked on the door, then came in and stood behind me, both of us looking in the mirror. She looked tired. I felt bad for her that she didn’t get to do things like get dressed up and go to church and go to ladies’ clubs and those things that my friends’ moms did. I was kind of pissed that she didn’t seem to want to.

  “You look lovely, honey. I want you to know that it’s okay to go and see what other people believe, but I don’t want you to feel pressured into anything, okay?”

  I just wanted her to disappear. All the ways she was sad. What did she have to teach me about anything?

  When Hunter’s mom pulled up, we left a tense Mom and Rick behind and slid onto the vinyl seats of her sky blue Chrysler that smelled like cherry air freshener. Before that I had only ever seen her through the glare of the car window as she dropped Hunter off. Margaret had long brown hair, thick like a horsetail, tied back by one of those fabric scrunchies. She wore a cardigan sweater and a simple jersey skirt and looked uncomplicated. She had an oddly shaped purple birthmark that crawled out the top of her sweater and up her neck to peek over the edge of her jawline. It made me like her right away.

  “Hello, Bebe. I’m Margaret,” she said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’m sorry it didn’t happen sooner. And I’m thrilled you can join us for church this morning. What a nice surprise.”

  While Margaret drove, I watched the familiar terrain along the Anthony Wayne Trail: the blocky skyline of downtown and the cramped aluminum-sided houses and the blue high-level bridge. But, unlike most low-sky, gray Toledo days, it all shimmered with a kind of sunlit warmth. I was on the inside of something. I felt a prickle of hope that maybe church would feel like home, as it clearly did to Hunter.

  The church was a little stand-alone stone box crowded in between a beauty supply shop and a storefront with paper over the windows with a For Rent sign hanging in the doorway. Out front a sign read:

  HOW DO I KNOW HE LIVES

  HE LIVES IN MY HEART

  It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but inside it was like walking into a party. I was introduced to what seemed at the time like hundreds of welcoming people, but, thinking back, it was probably more like eighty. On the tiny stage a band was setting up, a small drum set and an electric guitar and a bass. The band looked like kids from the high school. Actually, I think they were kids from the high school, two black guys and one white guy with a Flock of Seagulls haircut. In front of them was a pretty, fat gal with nice makeup and an acoustic guitar.

  The thing that surprised me was that it was white people and black people together and all acting like that wasn’t unusual or something. As if maybe they’d go home and be neighbors, which would be unlikely, considering even the working-class neighborhoods were split up pretty neatly—white people over here and black people over there. Of course the high school was all integrated in theory but in practice it was like two parallel worlds floating around next to each other and occasionally bumping into each other and fighting for space. I had a couple of black girlfriends because I was in sports. So I guess the trick was to have some kind of common goal, like winning. Or heaven.

  Something pressed up against the back of my throat as I shook their hands. It might have been hope, hope that I could be one of these people with the luminous smiles and the light in their eyes. I sat down next to Hunter and took a Bible from the back of the pew in front of me. It was dense, bound in faux leather, its thin pages crammed with tiny writing. On the front it said, simply, Holy Bible, in gold, embossed letters. Most of the people around me had their own dog-eared copy. I opened it to a random page and looked for a sign from God. A secret message I would instantly understand. I read this in the red writing:

  Because straight is the gate,

  and narrow is the way

  which leadeth unto life, and

  few there be that find it.

  It seemed more like a fortune cookie than a sign from God, except fortune cookies are cheerier. Kind of a letdown, but there it was. Maybe the meaning would become clear to me later.

  I knew from Hunter that the preacher, Pastor Dan, was an ex-biker who had left his criminal life when he found Jesus. He still had his bike. I had seen the massive chopper in the parking lot. The service started and there was music and then more music and every time I thought it was going to end there was still more music and I kind of wavered between being bored and wanting to sit down and thinking that if I wasn’t so self-conscious I could be having more fun. Because everyone else seemed to be having fun. I knew my mom would have rolled her eyes. Not exactly the Mensa convention, now, is it? she would have said. In front of me a woman with a salt-and-pepper afro danced with a tambourine in each hand. Hunter sang and closed his eyes but Margaret and many of the other people there held their arms or turned their palms to the sky. They closed their eyes and swayed and smi
led and by the end of the twenty minutes of music a handful of them had tears on their cheeks. I kind of swayed. I clasped and unclasped my hands. I felt like I was betraying someone but I wasn’t sure who.

  I craned my neck around trying to spot Pastor Dan, but when he finally took the stage, he wasn’t much to look at. I had expected some burly biker daddy with a gray ponytail, but Pastor Dan was a slim guy, head shaved bald, soft-spoken at first. He had eyelashes so blond they were almost invisible and close-set, watery blue eyes, which made him look like he was always on the verge of tears.

  The sermon that day was about redemption.

  “What does it mean to be redeemed? Have you truly been redeemed? Do you recognize the covenant that you’ve made with God, here? A covenant is a commitment, right? Right, Shirley and Bob? I just married those beautiful children last Sunday so they got an earful from me about what a covenant is. A covenant is a sacred contract. A contract where God says I will give you all that I have. I will give you grace.”

  Amen.

  “I will give you peace.”

  Amen.

  “You will be born again of the spirit and you will have a new life in me.”

  Amen.

  “But a covenant isn’t just a one-way contract, folks. Sorry. God loves you so much he gave his firstborn son so you could enter into this contract with him today, but you have got to give your life to God, too. At each fork in the road if you listen, if you quiet down and you pray, the Holy Ghost will move within you and will tell you which path God wants for you.”

  Yes, he will. Amen.

  “But here’s the kicker. You can say no. You can say, no, God, this other path looks better. I said no. I said no for years. I said, no, God. I like the drugs down this other path. I like the women down this path, Jesus. And Holy Father, I’m real sorry but there sure seems to be a whole lot more money down this other path for me. Now, you all are smart folks and I don’t need to tell you whose path that was. I really thought I could walk down that flashy path and have a little fun and I could confess later. But I had my motorcycle accident and I was in a coma for six whole days, folks, and I almost got to take a trip way farther down that path of selfishness than I ever intended to go.

  “But I heard the voice of Jesus while I was in that coma, and do you know what it said? It said, I love you, Daniel. It said, I’m waiting for you, Daniel. I’m here for you, Daniel, when you want to open your heart to me. I woke up and opened my mouth and the words that came out were, Lord Jesus, forgive me. Say it with me now if you want to. Lord Jesus, forgive me. I’m a sinner, Jesus. Come on into my life and forgive me and all I am is yours.”

  Amen.

  Everyone was crying by then. The hairs on my arms were standing up and I felt a little sick and something started humming in me.

  “So, folks, you can say no and no and no to Jesus and Jesus will still love you. Jesus will love you always because Jesus is love and he will wait, he will wait until you see, like I did, that Jesus is everything he said he was. He is the way. He is the truth. He is the life.

  “Now, is there anyone here today who doesn’t know Jesus yet? Who is ready today, right here, right now, to let Jesus into your heart, to accept Jesus as your Lord and savior?”

  I did want to be saved. I did want to be forgiven. Who doesn’t? And why not. Why not there. Why not then. Saved from every sad thing I had known and reborn as someone else.

  I stood. I was the only one that day. I stood and Margaret put her arms around me, her face glossy with tears. People sang and touched me and I stood in front of Pastor Dan and he laid his palm on my head and prayed over me and the whole world got brighter, like it was overexposed. And then it was over and I was born again. I had a new life, a new family, a new father in Jesus who wouldn’t drink himself to death.

  Two weeks later I was baptized. It was a windy Sunday in late fall. The congregation filed out to the parking lot and into a caravan of cars. Margaret’s friend Ruth rode shotgun and Hunter rode in the backseat of the Chrysler with me, holding my hand between both of his and smiling warmly. I tingled with the exquisite and unfamiliar feeling of actually getting something I wanted.

  There was a turnoff near a picnic spot in Water City, on the banks of the Maumee River. We arrived last. Everyone already stood by the side of the road waiting for us. I stepped out of the car and it was only a short, gravel-crunchy walk to the river’s edge, which was muddy and strewn with fallen leaves. We could hear the cars rushing by on the highway behind us.

  Margaret helped me on with my white robe and it felt nice to have my hands over my head and her pulling the robe down around me. She smoothed my hair out of my eyes and smiled like she was proud.

  Pastor Dan and me and Stacy-Ann, the kid from the band’s girlfriend, slipped together down the small incline to the river’s edge. And all I could think of was the cold, cold, cold water. Like a bath I took once when I had the measles. My mother sat beside me and sponged my forehead and the water felt like needles and I wanted to get out but I was so tired and I guess I almost died that night, is what my mother tells me. And when I look back on it I can see that right there, right in that thought, was the thread that would catch on a nail and unravel my whole cloak of faith before too long. Because I thought, just randomly, I’ll be in heaven with Jesus but where will my mother be, who sat by me, who doesn’t know Jesus, who probably never will because she’s had plenty of opportunity by now? In hell? And my pop? What kind of a God am I giving myself to? But the thought didn’t fully gel until later.

  Pastor Dan beckoned to us with his arms theatrically wide, calling us his children. Behind him the river was alive with sparkles of afternoon sunlight. He turned and waded in, smiling and undaunted, until he was waist high. Stacy-Ann went first. The temperature of the water stopped her in her tracks when she was ankle deep; then she set her face and propelled herself on by sheer will. She stumbled to the reverend’s side. He spoke a few words to her I couldn’t hear. Then she pinched her nose shut and fell backward and he cradled her in his arms until she was fully submerged. Stacy-Ann stood up, raised her arms to the sky, and ran for the shore into the elated cheers and warm blankets of her new brothers and sisters in Christ.

  I went next. I left my shoes and ran in without being called, my stocking feet partly numbed against the sharp stones of the riverbed, the cold water going straight to my bones. When I reached him, Pastor Dan put his arm around my back like how I imagined you would for a dip in a slow dance. He looked me in the eye and I felt like I was in the arms of John Travolta or something.

  “Because you believed with your heart and confessed with your mouth that Father God raised Jesus Christ from the dead and that Jesus Christ is now Lord of your life I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  It was that fast. And back we went.

  I held on to him and looked up into his eyes, blue as the glass marble blue of the sky behind him, the kind of blue that means heaven, right before the water splashed in around my face. And what I thought was, Here we go. My old life, my old fears, all my doubts and sins are being washed clean and I’ll emerge not perfect because only Christ is perfect and only a crazy person thinks they’re Christ, so not perfect but new. New.

  When I emerged, the drops of water on my eyelashes caught the sun and made swimmy starry spots in front of my eyes and Pastor Dan released me. But when I got to shore all I felt was blue cold. Not new.

  Fuck, I thought. There it still is, that square of wormy scared dark in my heart.

  Violet gets all fascinated by my born-again past and she asks me, what did it feel like? And I tell her, it didn’t feel like I thought it would. I didn’t feel new. Not at all. But I tried not to be disappointed. Because there was something I very definitely did feel. I felt love. I knew my church family loved me. I believed Jesus loved me. I didn’t stop believing that until later.

  Me and Jake walk out the door and navigate the sea of socializing bodies and the fog of cigarette s
moke. The meeting quieted Jake. He reaches for my hand as we stroll through the clear night back to the Ghetto Racer.

  It makes me want to laugh sometimes. I thought I cut the cord with God the day we pulled the cord on Aaron. I was sure I was done with God forever. And here I am in church. I traveled two thousand miles from Zion to sit in another church.

  I guess some people have to be born again and again.

  Eleven

  “Where do you want to go now? We still have a couple of hours before curfew.”

  Jake doesn’t answer but raises his eyebrows enigmatically as he pulls out and turns south down Vermont. We slide past gas stations and fast-food joints and Korean strip malls with their mysterious ciphers advertising boba coffee shops and karaoke clubs. I settle back, contented. I like driving at night, moving through shifting puddles of light, in between here and there.

  Jake hits Wilshire and makes a right. When they built all these beautiful old hotels and apartment buildings on Wilshire, they thought it was going to be the heart of the city. They didn’t know it would wind up just another long, long street in a town that can’t be said to have a heart.

  Wind rattles the bushy-topped trees growing out of their holes in the sidewalk. An impossibly huge and beautiful moon hangs dead center in front of us, lighting up the sky midnight blue, and it’s a right-place-at-the-right-time-on-the-right-side-of-the-earth’s-face kind of heartbeat. And I don’t wonder where we’re going; I don’t even care.