by Beth Goobie
Deacon Watch was nothing compared to Mother Watch. Soon after her transformation into the Divine Sister, my mother began to monitor all aspects of my play. Before this, she had taken a vivid but mostly hands-off interest in my activities; now, if she saw me drawing wings, fire, or tall glowing creatures, she would rip my picture in half and demand, “Draw Mother a cat.” I was allowed to build houses, cars, and people out of Lego or Plasticine, but when I formed a body with its spirit rising out of it and explained, “The body’s sleeping, so the soul’s going visiting to see what it can see,” my mother pounded it flat with her fist. Around this time, I developed a habit of hanging out of my bedroom window and watching the dusk rise slowly from the earth as I talked to angels that I claimed flew “everywhere that the air moves, Mother, but like love.” She never argued, simply formed her arms into a circle around my head and lowered them, pulling down an invisible hood of forgetfulness so dense that I stood momentarily confused, not remembering where I was or what I had been doing.
Gradually, as she maintained this constant patrol around my activities and thoughts, my ability to see and talk to “angels,” even my recollections of seeing them, began to fade. What did not fade, however, was my memory of losing the ability to see into other worlds—a sense of the way my mind had slowly been narrowed until I could only occasionally catch sight of my mother’s high-frequency apocalyptic landscape. For years, my favorite reading material remained the books of the Old Testament wherein loin-clothed prophets covered in boils snatched glimpses of forbidden places—those tingling invisible realms of the chosen ones that gave the air its electrical charge—and when I crept about at night, watching my mother commune with other dimensions, I understood full well that the distance between us was not spatial but vibratory, that she communed with a higher plane and I with a lower; she had been chosen and I had not.
Still, there were moments when consciousness broke open for me and I was able to fly past my mother as if it was her mind and memory that had been trapped within a mundane lower order. During my tenth year, the winter solstice fell on a Sunday. As was its custom, the Hamilton family was in attendance at the evening service, seated in the third pew as the choir sang and Pastor Playle pontificated for the elect. Suddenly, and entirely without warning, the air quivered as if a great wave of energy had passed through it, and the sanctuary lights flickered off and on. Gasps and cries sounded all around, but I found myself growing quickly distant from the panic, standing separate and alone within a silence that seemed to be deepening inward and shifting toward another level of reality. Desperately, I reached out with my hands, and small whimpers formed in my throat. Some kind of presence appeared to be drawing nigh—a realm that felt both familiar and completely unknown, its electrical charge so tangible, it could be physically sensed.
Again the air quivered and the sanctuary lights flickered off and on. What followed then is difficult to describe in human terms—a vast ethereal crescendo of voices and the rippling of a translucent light throughout the sanctuary, this light dancing and shifting like waves on the surface of a prismatic ocean. As I watched, open-mouthed, the waves of light took on the shape of tall glowing figures that separated from one another and began to walk through the congregation—figures that looked human but were transparent and appeared to pulse through a variety of forms, so that church members later insisted, They were as tall as the ceiling. They were tiny and small like the fairy people. They had wings and wore robes. No, they had no wings but were covered in eyes like in Revelations, and they carried scrolls to announce the end of the world.
Whatever their true form, these angels walked for one diaphanous moment among the congregation, touching each member somewhere on their person—forehead, mouth, or chest, for each individual it was different, but always spirit blessing flesh, welcoming contact. Across the sanctuary, people cried out in wonder, their wordless singing like yipping or laughter, so caught up in ecstasy that they did not appear to notice the angels circumvent my father, the Divine Sister, and Pastor Playle, refusing to lay hands on them. At least I never heard anyone speak of it—only I seemed to be given this awareness, the angels making me also wait untouched between my parents as they made contact with every other member of the congregation. Then, coming together into a single brilliant pulse, they swept toward and directly through my body, returning to whence they had come and filling me with such unboundaried joy that I gave utterance in gut-raw sounds, roaring and dancing until exhaustion laid me onto the floor.
For several days following, I was consumed with the memory of this event, but to my bewilderment, neither of my parents would discuss it, directing me instead toward the usual Christmas activities. At the same time, my mother’s nightly prowls intensified and she seemed always to be touching me; whether it was my shoulder, arm, or cheek, I sensed that she was thereby drawing something from my body to hers—a force, tangible but invisible, was leaving me. This process was so imperceptible, I did not notice that my memory of the solstice angels was also fading, and it was only when Pastor Playle launched into a joyful description of the incident the following Sunday evening that it came back to me, but vaguely, like reflections scattered across a watery surface.
It had been a long sermon and the good pastor stood slumped at the podium, his tie loosened and his strained voice cracking as he raised an open Bible. “And the glory of the Lord came down among us!” he proclaimed huskily.
“Amen!” shouted my reliable father.
“It was the night angels walked among us!” cried Pastor Playle, rocking back onto his heels.
“Yes, brother!” called my father, rocking in counter-
rhythm.
“And the Divine Sister!” sang Pastor Playle. “The Divine Sister called them to us! It was her faith, her example—”
About me rose a great chorus of “Amens” as people stood to clap their hands and sway, but in the third pew I remained seated, weighed down by a sudden knowing: Pastor Playle was lying. Though my memories of the solstice visitation were now vague, I could still pinpoint the exact moment the angels had swept toward and through me, ignoring my parents, who stood to either side. Whoever had called them, it had not been the Divine Sister, and Pastor Playle knew it. And if the good pastor was lying about this, he had lied about other things.
That liar was my mother’s only translator.
The next day marked the beginning of a three-day provincial Waiting for the Rapture retreat at a rural conference center. Placed in a cabin of ten-year-old girls, I rarely saw my parents except at evening services, when they were involved with Scripture reading, song leading, and prophecy. One of my cabinmates had brought along a book she had received for Christmas called Codes of the Ages, and I borrowed it, sneaking it into services to read during the sermons. One of the chapters described methods for creating a secret language, and my cabinmates and I went into typical ten-year-old contortions of delight as we inserted the word fuck between the first and second syllable of every multi-syllable word and claimed the result as an ancient Mesopotamian language. One afternoon during quiet time, when our counselor temporarily stepped out of the cabin, I asked the other girls if they thought speaking in tongues was actually a kind of code.
“You mean like speaking backward?” one girl asked eagerly.
“That’s how Satan talks, idiot,” said another.
The girl who owned Codes of the Ages was scrutinizing me. “You think your mom’s a fake,” she accused.
“No, I don’t,” I protested. “It could be that the code is in there, but she’s so carried away with her revelations that she doesn’t know. I mean, it makes sense that God would be using a code so we could figure it out. Because…”
Heart pounding, I paused, then blurted out, “What if a false serpent became her translator? That could happen, you know. And if it did, God would want to give us some way of exposing him, wouldn’t He?”
“You think Pastor Playle�
��s a false serpent?” someone demanded excitedly.
“I don’t know,” I said, backing off from a direct accusation. “But what if?”
“I bet the Divine Sister’s been sticking ‘fuck’ into her revelations all over the place, and we never even noticed!” yelped someone.
“I think it was God’s will that this book about codes ended up in our cabin so we could decipher the Divine Sister’s code and figure out if Pastor Playle is telling us the truth,” I announced.
Everyone agreed that we should begin work at once on decoding my mother’s glory-talk. Solemnly, we accepted our assigned lists of syllables, swearing on our mothers’ graves to keep a record of how often they occurred in the Divine Sister’s glory-talk and to track any discernible patterns. It was a tough job for a group of ten-year-olds, hunched in a pew and trying to take surreptitious notes on the occurrence rate of a particular vowel within the speech of a babbling un-miked woman located on the opposite side of the room while everyone in the immediate vicinity clapped and shouted out with joy. In fact, it took approximately two minutes for our plot to be uncovered—we were all hunched shoulder to shoulder in the same pew—and then we were led to the front of the sanctuary and forced to confess the sorry scheme in front of the entire congregation.
One by one, we knelt before the Divine Sister and she placed her hands on our heads, praying in tongues while Pastor Playle translated, so that all might hear what the Lord had to say regarding the individual forgiveness of each remorseful girl. I was the last to kneel and make my repentance. As the Divine Sister placed her hands on my head, I felt something heated and bright, like an invisible fire, tighten around my scalp. Instinctively I cringed, then glanced up at my mother, and in that moment I saw a white-winged creature, transparent and ethereal as the solstice angels but with altogether different intentions. Instead of pulsing within a great prismatic ocean of knowing, this creature manifested alone, vibrating inside my mother’s body like the wire in an electric lightbulb, and the expression on its face was entirely remote, as distant from the experience of flesh—its joy and pain—as it was possible to be. In a flash, I realized that I was seeing the Divine Sister in her true form: She was not human but a hostile vibration from another realm that had invaded my mother’s body and taken up residence, with or without her consent.
As the circle of fiery white pain tightened around my head, I pushed against it, rising halfway to my feet and trying to press through the Divine Sister to my mother—that mother who, years ago, had been stolen from me along with Louisie. But I was not strong enough. Even as I resisted, a heaviness came over me, and a darkness; I was pushed back down to my knees and the Divine Sister prayed over me. Then I was led to the portable baptismal tank for a spontaneous baptism, where Pastor Playle held me under so long, I was truly born anew.
•••
Jez’s first party could be heard from a block away; the earth moved under her feet as she and Dee came up the front walk. The surrounding neighborhood had been claimed decades earlier by university students, and the dilapidated two-story clapboard house they were approaching was typical to the area—the windows draped with national flags and the front porch stacked with cartons of empties. As the two girls started up the porch steps, a pair of naked buttocks appeared in an upstairs window, mooning Planet Earth. Giving it an earsplitting whistle, Dee pulled Jez through the crowd of stoners on the porch, their acrid smoke and M*A*S*H T-shirts, all of them several years older and murmuring, “Hey, lovelies, where ya goin’? I’ve got somethin’ here—”
The doorway loomed, electric with the press of bodies and high-pitched laughter, and then they were penetrating deep into the inside of a headache—Deep Purple pounding in the room to the right, Jimi Hendrix resonating from the left. Smoke, sweat, and perfume layered the air, guys dancing bare-chested, girls in their bras; underfoot, the floorboards pulsed like a blood throb. Farther down the hall, the crowd divided as the upstairs-window mooner came streaking down the stairs, one more hallucination in a long, party-hard trip.
As the streaker disappeared out the front door, Jez found herself being hauled in the opposite direction—along the crowded hallway and into a kitchen lit dimly by strings of flashing Christmas lights. Confiscating two beers from the fridge, Dee popped both tabs and handed her one. Then, reaching under her skirt, she slid a small foil pouch out of her garter, opened it, and tipped several yellow and red capsules into her hand. “One for you, two for me,” she grinned, dropping one into Jez’s palm. “Pop it quick. We’ve got some catching up to do.”
Without waiting for Jez’s response, she swallowed her two capsules, then chugged half her beer and returned the foil pouch to her garter. “Take a look,” she yelled over the music, pointing through the open back doorway to several semiconscious bodies lolling on an outside staircase that led to the second floor. “Stairway to Heaven. If you want to actually talk to someone, you’ve got to get here early.”
It was the weekend following Jez’s “lesson” in Sinbad’s backseat, sometime into the wee hours of Saturday morning. Her parents had also slept soundly through tonight’s escape, but this time Dee had shown mercy, parking the idling Sinbad in an alley half a block from the Hamilton residence. A change of clothing had awaited in the Bug—a red spaghetti-strap stretch minidress, black lace underthings, black nylons, black heels. No bra. “A true Jezebel,” Dee had said approvingly after completing Jez’s face. “Maybe you’re not quite ready for guys, but you’ll still be a mother of fun.”
Dee was an I Dream of Jeannie wet dream in a black push-up bra, loose brocaded vest, and black miniskirt. As Jez closed one hand uncertainly around the capsule she had been given, Dee shut her eyes, raised both arms toward the kitchen’s high ceiling, and began to snake her body to the Deep Purple/Hendrix sound fusion. Within seconds, an audience started gathering in the hall doorway, their gaze predatory, their comments loud and appreciative. Seemingly unaware, Dee continued to snake and swivel, absorbed by the energy of her own movement, but Jez found herself stepping back into the room’s shadows, arms crossed over a braless chest and trying to calm a growing sense of panic. On and off the Christmas lights flickered as the music throbbed through the floorboards and Jez’s heart thudded body-wide. The sensations pounding through her were extreme, composed in equal measure of fear and the most savage turn-on she had ever experienced, and she didn’t know whether to pop the yellow and red capsule in her hand and throw herself, wide open, at whatever was coming, or hold onto the tiniest shred of sanity and wait it out.
Arms still raised, Dee continued to curl her body in, under, and around the beat. Somewhere nearby, Hendrix came to an end and was replaced with AC/DC. Concentration broken, Dee opened her eyes and assessed the audience in the doorway, then glanced over her shoulder at Jez, laughing as if the whole thing were the punch line to a joke shared only by the two of them. But before Jez could react, a voice called “Dee baby!” and a tall guy with a closely clipped beard stepped through the packed doorway and enveloped Dee, kissing her neck and sliding one hand under the back of her skirt. Still swiveling, she pressed against him and he stripped off her vest, flinging it over the heads of the watching crowd. With a laugh, Dee pulled his face to her own and kissed him hard, and Jez realized that whatever the reason she had been brought here tonight, she had just been erased from the shifting terrain of her friend’s brain and was now completely alone—a stranger in a very strange land.
Without further ado, the bearded guy upended Dee over his shoulder and pushed into the hallway crowd, Dee drumming her hands unevenly on his butt. Quickly, Jez shoved her way after them, jumping frantically to keep Dee’s upside-down body in sight as it turned into Deep Purple and flashing red floor-lights. Reaching the doorway, she saw Dee once again on her feet, momentarily dizzy and wobbling, then close-dancing with the bearded guy, their hips pasted. A knowing grin on his face, the bearded guy spoke into her ear and stepped back, and Dee exploded into movement
, transformed into a twisting red-lit vortex that everyone turned to watch, their approval pounded out with hands and feet.
Pressed between a bookcase and a large potted fern, Jez huddled bug-eyed and hugging herself. On all sides, a sweaty half-dressed throng stood cheering Dee on, the floor shaking under the collective stomp of their feet. Never in her life had Jez been so relieved at being unnoticed. She had been in this house for under a half hour, and already the constant adrenaline rush had her on the verge of the shakes. Opening her hand, she let the yellow and red capsule fall into the potted fern. A year ago, in a fit of innocence, she had read Go Ask Alice. The novel hadn’t put her off chemical euphoria entirely, but if she ever swallowed a completely unfamiliar get-happy pill, she knew it wouldn’t be in a room of stoners like this one—all of them on the edge of fornication and probably sporting multiple cases of VD.