by Beth Goobie
Without question, Louisie was his favorite child. From early on she responded most strongly to him, and he liked to boast that, when she discovered her knees, she crawled to him. His employment required he be frequently on the road; as soon as Louisie was old enough to understand the words “Daddy’s coming home today,” she could be found with her toys in the front hall, waiting for him to walk through the door. As a toddler, it was always Daddy’s lap she wanted to sit on, Daddy for whom she drew all her pictures; she even wrote To Daddy on the inside of her first grade Mother’s Day card.
But when my father reached for his other daughter, he was met with an extreme case of the squirmies. More often than not, I twisted, slithered, or dropped as a deadweight to the floor, even bit and kicked to escape his embrace. What was obvious to me, though apparently concealed from him, was the overwhelming sense that when my father reached for me, he was actually reaching for a carbon copy of Louisie—and I was not Louisie. “Mary-Eve!” he would say, distraught, but all I knew was that his hands were reaching for the Louisie that he wanted to discover inside me—the slow, awed tilt of her spirit, her high, quirky giggle, and the way she dropped everything to run, crying “Daddy!” toward him.
My mother’s body remembered. Deep within, she carried the memory of Louisie and me, the way I carried that small nub of pleasure inside the lips between my legs. Sometimes when she gazed at the two of us, I could feel the lostness ringing in her like a dull bell; I could go to her then and be absorbed into its familiar cry resonating through her skin. Once, long ago, Louisie and I had been one—my twin’s skin had been my skin, and vibrations had flowed unchecked between us, ethereal as angel song. If our bodies had since separated, still I looked at her and saw myself—evidence that part of me had been stolen, that in some high-crying, long-lost moment, hands had reached into my innermost private place, into that shared heartbeat of the womb, and turned Louisie one hundred and eighty degrees away from me. As evidence, all our father had to do was lift his hands and call “Louisie!” and his word became flesh—her flesh, flying toward his.
Our father, it must be understood, comprehended none of this. He was a thief who did not know what he had stolen, a trespasser with no grasp of the territory he was traveling. Still, he came inevitably to represent primarily an intrusion into my life, a situation exacerbated by his road trips, during which Louisie unfailingly reversed the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree shift that normally directed her attention so single-mindedly toward him and realigned herself, albeit reluctantly, to me. As if the greater magnet had gone and the lesser attraction reinstated itself, she would settle with a sigh against my shoulder or flop into my lap, the soft curve of her body as familiar as the taste of my own mouth. Peace opened its inner places then, and mysterious music played through my skin, but the reunion was always temporary, lasting only until heavy footsteps once again claimed the front porch and Louisie tore herself free to rocket enthusiastically toward him.
But if I staggered through my first several years stunned and bereft, I did not trail after my twin, the tail of a comet attempting to rejoin its head. Young as I was, I understood that what had been lost was lost. As our father sat on the living room couch with a chirping Louisie in his arms, I wormed wordlessly behind an armchair in the opposite corner, licked my wound, and called it home. And from this position inside pain, I noted what Louisie, in her Daddy-worship, did not—the dark, murky silences that blighted the air between our parents, unexplained bruises on our mother’s arms and legs, the way she changed when our father returned from a road trip, and the ways we changed with her.
This alteration took place regularly, silent as fluid poured from one glass into another of a dissimilar shape; without acknowledgment, we took on different lives and the keeping of secrets. As far as I know, our father never realized that our mother often slept in Sunday mornings when he was absent, nor did he hear about the skipped sermons, the revamped Bible stories, or the flannel graph board games. During those early years, our mother developed a technique of talking around details when she spoke to our father, referring to the life we led while he was on the road as “the time you were gone,” “the time we spent missing you,” or “the time we waited for you to come home.” Louisie was as much an observer of these scenarios as I, yet if our mother’s lips tightened when our father sent us, once again, to our room to change, I seemed to be the only one who noticed. And if our mother rubbed her temples as our father launched into another corrective breakfast monologue, it was a further signal my twin neglected to pick up on. In the end, Louisie, with her eyes fixed adoringly on Daddy, failed to see the way our mother lived a divided life—reining herself in tightly when our father was present and funneling all possibility into his absence.
It was my discovery of the word no that gave me a creeping understanding of our mother’s tactics. This short life-changing syllable entered Louisie’s and my vocabulary during one of our father’s lengthier road trips; had he been present, no doubt our initial fervor would have been abruptly curtailed. As it was, however, our mother delighted in the way we latched on to the word, marching about the house and chanting it at the top of our lungs. The word had me thunderstruck and riding the power of my mouth; everything changed under its auspice; possibilities abounded, and I drew them to me with fierce determination: No, I was not going to wear that stupid yellow duckie top. No, I was not going to swallow that gucky oatmeal. No, I was not going to quit the beautiful sun-singing afternoon to take a nap on my parents’ bed with the ugly green-nubbed bedspread that left pockmarks in my skin.
Our mother’s response was to dissolve into a fit of giggles, chortling and tickling me in the ribs until I collapsed screeching into her arms, then promptly carry me off for the dreaded nap. Instinctively, she sensed the magic the word created for a young child—the way it built an invisible kingdom, boundaries her daughters could strut along in two-year-old magnificence. And she knew well the world coming to us, a world merciless and unceasing in its dictates; as long as she could, she gave us a taste of Heaven and let the consequences be damned.
As a result, our father returned from his road trip to find his daughters mutated into full-blown hellions. Completely unsuspecting, he walked through the front door, scooped the waiting Louisie into one arm, opened the other, and called, “Mary-Eve!” But instead of dragging my feet toward him as usual, I retreated to the opposite end of the hall, stomped one foot, and bellowed, “No!” Finally, I could release it in his presence—the word that had been building inside me for two years—and I trumpeted it with unmitigated triumph. “No-no-no-no-no!” I hollered, flooded with exhilaration and meaning. “No-no-no-no-no-NO!”
Setting Louisie down, our father came at me, grabbed my arm, and slapped me hard across the face. Shattered, I sank sobbing to the floor and curled into a ball. A shouting match erupted between our parents, Louisie watching wide-eyed from the front entrance as I crept whimpering toward our bedroom. Thus ended my twin’s protests against the adult world, and our father never realized that the “no” revolution had once claimed both his daughters. But if that was the moment Louisie surrendered permanently to Daddy, my retreat was only temporary. For more than a year I took on our father at every opportunity, yelling “No!” through doorways and across rooms, and bellowing defiance both inside the house and out. In response, he took me on like an obstinate piece of furniture, a bit of the material world gone awry; gradually, inexorably, wearing bruises and my mother’s thin-lipped silence, I realigned to the word yes. Finally, in a lonely backyard ceremony, I dug a hole among the petunias, spoke that heartbeat syllable deep into the darkness where it would be safe, and covered it with dirt.
For years afterward, the word remained buried—a forgotten memory entombed beneath my father’s world while I wandered its surfaces, fighting vague disconnected battles. With Louisie’s death, this deficit became more pronounced, for I had lost the yes of my life as well as the no. As for my father, it was obviou
s that he had also lost his yes, and had thereby been reduced once again to that half-finished figure rooted in mud. Day after day, he returned from work, opened the front door, then stood waiting out the house’s long moan of silence before removing his overcoat and hanging it up. Not once did he call out to me; instead, he stared at his coat’s dangling emptiness as if something were hidden within it, meaning only his dull eyes could discover. No longer did he go about the house making small corrections to furniture, and I often caught glimpses of him seated in his undershorts on the side of his bed, staring at the tossed heap of his clothing, the window drapes, even a movement of air, as if these things held lost parts of himself—fragments he could sense but no longer touch.
The death of his daughter tore my father’s world end to end, leaving him without sanctuary. He was no one; he could have become anyone. When my mother suggested a transfer to a different city, he agreed. When she chose the house on Quance Crescent, he did not protest. When she walked through the door of an innocuous-looking stucco church, he followed, a distraught vacuum looking to be filled. Without remorse, the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle descended upon him, then swallowed, digested, and spat him out in its image: Deacon Hamilton—Scripture reader, prayer leader, personalized parking space, and carefully crafted face sinking, ever-bewildered, further into the mud.
•••
“Man, this place has a freaky buzz,” said Dee.
They were parked outside the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle, Dee frowning through the windshield as she observed the benign-looking stucco building. It was approximately ninety minutes before the Sunday evening service, the mid-December air dense with snow that drifted quiet as the thoughts of God. Across the parking lot sat the only other car—the janitor’s ancient Volvo—gently disappearing under an endless fall of white.
“Where’d they get that neon job?” she added disbelievingly, pointing to a large crimson electric cross above the front entrance—a hypnotic glow that flashed three seconds on, three seconds off in the dark.
“They bought it last year,” said Jez. “Special order from Louisiana.” Butting out her cigarette, she opened the passenger door and stepped out into the crisp evening air.
“What—from the KKK?” demanded Dee as she emerged from the other side, coatless and shivering in Jez’s Sunday best—a vermilion midi with a tiny white collar.
“Probably,” said Jez, heading for the church door. Right behind her, Dee scurried nervously up the freshly shoveled walk. Having balked at the prospect of borrowing Jez’s oxfords, she was wearing a pair of low-heeled black pumps—a bit racy for Waiting for the Rapture, Jez reflected, but they would have to do. It had taken a half hour of intense cajoling to convince Dee to ditch her makeup, and without it her face was surprisingly vulnerable, the startling blue of her eyes less of an attack, the soft flush of her lips a kiss rising direct from the nerves. Even her demon seemed subdued, a vague red shimmer around her head. As Jez pulled open the church door, she shot the demon a nervous glance. What if one of the parishioners tuned into the ferret face’s wavelength and saw it? Even worse, the Divine Sister?
With a shrug, she ditched the thought and passed into the entranceway. To her right hung a large banner that displayed Jesus in a white robe and crown of thorns, blood dripping from his forehead as he patted a flock of surrounding sheep. Something about the sheep’s stunned-silly expressions—Jez had never been able to pin down exactly what it was—had always conjured up vague memories of long-ago Mouseketeers singing “M-I-C-K-E-Y…”
“Creepy,” muttered Dee, glancing at the banner as she passed. “Churches give me the creeps.”
“Just imagine the place draped in black,” Jez said tersely as she removed her jacket. “A couple of knives stuck in the door. That should make it feel like home sweet home.” She was on edge and well aware of it; as she hung up her lime jacket, the coatrack’s long row of metal hangers rocked and clanked like the tinny insides of her brain. Dee was right though, she thought, glancing around the lobby. There was something in the air tonight—as if the church were alive with static, had blown its wiring and released electricity free-form into its walls.
“Fuck!” hissed Dee, narrow-eyed. “Can’t you feel it?”
“You’re the one with the Eye,” said Jez, ducking the question. The slight deception left her uneasy, but for all she knew, she reasoned defensively, giving Dee a straight answer could result in the other girl’s taking off, reneging on her promise to stick out the entire service. After all, she hadn’t wanted to come—had whined, grumped, and outright howled about missing The Six Million Dollar Man—but both girls knew she owed Jez big time. A heavy dose of guilt, some soft-lipped pleading—Jez had worked anything and everything to tease the other girl into the vermilion midi, then in behind Sinbad’s wheel. And for what? she thought, frowning at the empty lobby. Jez didn’t know what she expected Dee to sniff out tonight; she didn’t have a goddamn clue.
“What’s that?” asked Dee, her gaze fixing on what Jez liked to think of as the “concession stand”—a glassed-in gift shop that had replaced the original front-lobby sales booth several years ago. Unfortunately, at least as far as Jez was concerned, it continued to feature photographs of the Divine Sister and her family, with large blowups facing prominently outward on the shelves.
“Would you look at that!” exclaimed Dee, pointing to a recent photo of Jez in which she was holding a white Bible and gazing sullenly at the camera. “Baby, you sell for $1.95.”
“Overpriced,” admitted Jez. “I’m not a big seller.” Pointedly, she turned toward the sanctuary, but Dee’s nose remained glued to the glass.
“Weren’t you a cute little ducky,” she murmured, indicating an early picture of Jez toddling toward the camera in diapers and a huge grin. Ending abruptly along one side, the photograph was one of the few survivors of Rachel Hamilton’s scissor rampages, its missing half having disappeared long ago into obscurity.
“Quack, quack,” Jez said dispassionately.
“What gives?” asked Dee, raising an eyebrow at her. “You’re cute, but Jezzie, why are they selling you? What’s your turn-on?”
“There,” said Jez, stabbing a finger at a photograph of the Divine Sister, in which she stood gazing beatifically at a large wooden cross that dominated one of the sanctuary walls. “That’s my mother, okay? She’s a prophetess, famous in Waiting for the Rapture circles. Pilgrims come from all across the country, even the U.S., to hear her. And they like to buy mug shots of her family.”
“Your mom’s famous?” demanded Dee, her face incredulous. “Like Billy Graham? One million souls saved for Jesus?”
“Close,” said Jez, heading into the sanctuary, “but no cigar. Come on.” Without waiting for a response, she passed through the archway into the sanctuary. Here too the last few years had brought changes. Oak pews now faced the stage in three sections, and a balcony overlooked the proceedings from the back. Next to the new choir loft stood a baby grand piano, and three scarlet-cushioned armchairs sat ponderously behind the podium. With all the improvements, however, no one had thought to replace the puke-amber glass that partitioned the sanctuary from the lobby or the endlessly whispering ceiling fans, and the baptismal tank still gave off the same creeping odor of chlorine. But the main problem here tonight was something else, thought Jez as she observed the familiar scene—a discordant note that couldn’t be heard, something hidden like blood pulsing under skin…an invisible hysteria that could be sensed even without the congregation moaning and calling out from the pews.
“Shiiiit!” hissed Dee, coming up beside her. “What kind of church are you running here, Jez?”
“I dunno,” Jez said uncertainly. “It’s weird tonight. I’ve never felt it like this, exactly.”
“This ain’t new,” said Dee, slit-eyed as she gazed around herself. “You’re just finding it, baby. Something big’s got this place—
had it for years.”
“You mean God?” asked Jez.
“I mean ugly,” said Dee. Slowly, they progressed up the center aisle, Jez watching Dee the way a water diviner watches her rod, trusting it to find what she can’t locate on her own. Two steps ahead, the other girl walked carefully, throwing out her mind like radar and scanning realities Jez could barely discern…as through a veil, she thought suddenly, realization catching in her throat. Dee, on the other hand, had torn that veil asunder—she had been torn, her body the veil. Wary, a hiss constant in her throat, the butterfly girl approached the front of the sanctuary, pausing to stare at the large wooden cross on the wall, the three armchair thrones, and the podium.
“What’s this?” she asked. Climbing the stairs to the stage, she walked past the podium and stopped, then passed her hands vaguely through the air. “There’s something here,” she said, her eyes glazing over. “Right here.”
“What d’you mean?” asked Jez, confused. “There’s nothing there. Nothing—”
“Right here,” insisted Dee, sketching out a large, squarish object with her hands. “Like this. A cage. With wheels.”
Jez’s mouth dropped open, full of soundlessness.