by Karen Piper
Eventually, I decided it was seven years old.
“Lord Jesus, I am a sinner,” I said while sitting on the toilet as soon as I turned seven. “I accept you into my heart.” Suddenly, I realized that maybe the toilet part canceled it out, though the bathroom was the only place in the house to be alone. Even though I was not going when I said it, I still did not get the feeling of bliss that you were supposed to have afterward. That was how you knew it worked. I might have blasphemed Jesus with the toilet.
All I could do was say the prayer over and over in hopes that it would take in time before the Rapture. So I wandered around the house, repeating the prayer in my head, a glazed look in my eyes. My mom would pat me on the head or hand me a stuffed animal, but no one knew what I was doing. “Karen likes to be alone,” my mom said. Still, I never got the feeling. It was aggravating.
Finally, it occurred to me that maybe it was something other than the toilet. There was this secret thing I did, which I called “exercising,” when I hid in the closet. In fact, I did it far too much. “Exercising” was also what my mom said the planes did when they were dropping bombs, but this was a different kind of euphemism. “Oh, they’re exercising today,” she would say cheerily, looking at the sky. But mine was like the Sin of Onan, except for girls. Was there such a thing?
It was clearly time for the Christian school to figure all this out.
To be closer to our new school, my family picked up and moved to town. Ridgecrest had only a few small shops for things that people could not get on the base, such as Lindsay’s Furniture and Corney’s Shoes. We all knew the Lindsay family, who we said “ran the town.” At the time, people were moving off the base as fast as houses could be built, leaving mostly military people on the base. Slowly, old base housing was torn down as it was abandoned; there were warnings not to let kids play in abandoned housing tracks, which were full of snakes and spiders.
One of the reasons people moved was religion. Technically, God was not allowed on the base, due to a constitutional clause known as “the separation of church and state.” As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their ‘legislature’ should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Since the state owned the base, it would have had to make rules allowing Christian churches to set up there, which would both be discriminatory and mix up religion with the state. At least, that was how we saw it then. Instead of churches, we had one “chapel” on the base, and it was ecumenical, with a revolving altar for Catholics, Jews, and Protestants.
Perhaps this is why there was a strange duality between town and base life. If China Lake had the most PhDs per capita in the United States, Ridgecrest had the most churches per capita in California. One China Laker described his surprise upon realizing how religious the community was: “I concluded that six days a week the folks follow the reality of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but on the seventh day they toss reason aside.” He continued, “Before one test flight the group I was working in had a prayer breakfast. They were essentially praying that the mathematical equations were correct! I will never forget that.” It was common to pray before missile tests for decades at China Lake; that was allowed, just not churches.
Of course, Ridgecrest was attractive for other reasons too. You did not have to be religious to want to leave a government gray duplex. Our new house, about a mile outside the gates, was a bright blue ranch style with a green lawn and even a flower bed with roses. Inside, there was a plastic chandelier and our very own intercom system for spying on one another. In fact, Christine and I had picked that house over another for the intercom alone. The only problem with our new house was that we were suddenly outside the base fence and cut off from the desert. Our dog, Patches, who once wandered the desert freely with my sister and me, started running frantically in circles around the backyard. On the base, our duplex had only a two-sided fence, but now there were three, with a dangerous street out front if we let Patches roam. In Ridgecrest, we stayed inside, where my mom had her Swedish Dala horses, red enameled wooden toy horses from her ancestral home of Dalarna. She had her Gaither Trio albums, her gilded Bibles, and a pretty chandelier to go with her Wedgewood china with real gold trim. Christine and I only had each other and an intercom to follow each other wherever we went. We also, finally, got to walk to school together every morning.
On the first day of school, we all had on our matching uniforms: blue polyester jumpers with pleated skirts for the girls and blue pants with red or white shirts for the boys. Our mothers had to make them because you could not buy them in stores or online as you can now, since that Baptist pastor later diversified and started selling uniforms along with his packets of God’s knowledge. Underneath the jumper, we wore either a red or a white shirt. Pinned to the jumper, we wore a “kerchief” covered in American flags. Those we bought from our church, who bought them from a supplier in Texas.
Our classroom, for fifth to eighth graders, was behind the church and constructed out of cinder-block bricks made from a nearby extinct volcano. I was in the fifth grade, the youngest out of twenty, in a classroom with a linoleum floor, white walls, and gray metal folding chairs. It looked like the government. Long wooden desks ran along the length of the wall with particleboard white “dividers” to separate the students from one another. Each of us was assigned a “cubicle” with our name on a “star chart” posted on a corkboard wall inside. On it, we marked our progress in finishing PACEs—Packets of Accelerated Christian Education. Each day, we sat and faced the corkboard and the wall. On top of each divider was a hole in which we could insert either a miniature Christian flag—white with a blue square in the corner and a red cross inside of that, to remind us of Jesus’s blood—to ask a personal question or an American flag for an academic question, which really meant asking permission to go to the score table. Christian was for permission to go to the bathroom. Maybe there were other “personal” questions, but I never had one in my eight years there.
The teachers were called “monitors” because they did not teach. Instead, they monitored us. As our founder explained, “Although ACE recommends all teachers hold at least a BS degree, the most important degree is a BA (Born Again) in Salvation.” We learned from booklets at this school rather than teachers. Only later did my dad realize that he would have to teach us algebra every night since the monitors could not help us. Besides having a BA, the monitors had to be “modest in dress and appearance, meek of spirit and personality, active in church and community life, clean in conversation and personal life, and a student of the Scriptures.” If they met all those qualifications, all they had to do all day was go around the room answering flags—or “monitoring.”
On the first day, our monitor Mr. Crackling explained what would become my daily regime for the next nine years. He looked like Santa Claus but with a red mustache instead of a white beard and an American flag outfit instead of a soft red suit. He was Scottish and had a real Scottish terrier and liked to play the bagpipes for boys’ study groups that met at his house.
He also liked to yell.
“Every morning,” Mr. Crackling said gruffly, “you will stand by your desk, facing me, until you are told to be seated. First, we will inspect your uniforms. Girls, get on your knees.” We did as he said.
Then Miss Carter went around the room, measuring the distance between our uniform hem and the floor to ensure there was not more than one inch. At the same time, Mr. Crackling inspected the boys’ uniforms and made sure their hair was at least half an inch above their ears. Girls’ blouses could be opened no more than three fingers below the clavicle. Boys’ pants could be neither too short nor too long, both of which signified something subversive. Miss Carter, who went to our church, was a frail-looking woman who seemed far too skinny and always had dark circles
under her eyes. To inspect our uniforms, she had to crawl on her knees from student to student with a ruler. I might have felt sorry for her, but I was too worried about my uniform. If it wasn’t right, then I would get sent home in front of everyone.
Mr. Crackling continued when we were done. “Next, you will pledge allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. First the Christian flag. . . .”
We all started, “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe.” It quickly became clear to me that this school would be much like the military, with drill sergeants, standing at attention, and following orders. I was actually very good at following orders.
“Now, did I see hands on everyone’s hearts?” Mr. Crackling seemed to enjoy our mistakes. “Do you not pledge with your heart? Hands on hearts!”
“I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word . . . ,” we read.
We then learned about swats, demerits, and detention and how that all worked. When Mr. Crackling laughed, his big belly shook in a jolly way that was also kind of scary. He picked up a big wooden paddle full of holes to lessen the wind resistance and make it go faster. He swung it through the air like a baseball bat, demonstrating swats, which made me think of the Special Weapons Attack Teams that were busy in south-central LA.
After we sat down, Mr. Crackling walked around the room, giving us our PACEs in social studies, math, science, and English. As he did this, he told us we were not allowed to stand up or turn around or communicate with other students. This would lead to demerits, detentions, or swats, depending on the severity of the offense. Communicating with other students, we were told, “undermined the authority of God and the supervisors.” We would get a twenty-minute break for lunch, which we could eat under the two cottonwood trees outside or in our cubicles. A lot of us opted for the cubicles, including me.
Though the atmosphere was closely guarded and quiet, and nothing moved, there were lots of rules. It seemed like you were safest if you did nothing. It was also best not to move too fast in case you did something wrong. I learned to freeze like an animal. Over time, I was sure I had become invisible. Literally. I even created an invisible friend, who lived under the score table, to keep me company.
My social studies PACE had a cartoon picture of a family on the cover, with the bubble over the father’s head saying, “My family will serve the Lord,” and the bubble over the mother’s head saying, “It is God’s plan for the father to be head of his family. I talk to your father about things, but he is the one who decides what we must do.” The whole packet was full of bubbles over cartoon heads. On one page, the mother said, “Men are better at science and math because of how their minds work. Women are happier working in the house, while men are happier outside of the home.” On another page, I learned that true peace was impossible in this world and could be found only in the next world with God. We learned that the only government that would work was “the government which will be instituted under direct and personal Millennial rule of the Lord Jesus Christ.” On the base, we all knew the government did not work very well. So that made sense.
In science, I learned scientific proof for Noah’s flood and that dinosaurs and humans once lived together, proven by the fact that their footprints were found together near the Paluxy River in Texas. This confused me because our preacher said that dinosaur bones had been planted by Satan to trick people into believing in evolution. He said dinosaurs never even existed. According to my PACE, proof that the world was only six thousand years old had been supplied by the first men who landed on the moon. Apparently, everyone was afraid there would be so much dust on the moon, owing to millions of years of accumulation and evolution, that the astronauts would just sink in and die. Instead, there was only six inches of dust, which took six thousand years to make. The moon proved that the Bible was literally true. We were instructed to fill in this information in sentences that read, “The moon is ___________ years old. How do scientists know this? ___________.” The man in charge of the moon mission, Wernher von Braun, was also a creationist, as we learned in a PACE. He had said, “For me the idea of a creation is inconceivable without God. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be a divine intent behind it all.”
It was only the missionary books, which we called “English literature,” that started to cause me problems. There was God’s Smuggler, about a man who carried Bibles across the border to the Soviet Union, over and over again. Literally nothing else happened. Then there was Jungle Pilot, about a missionary who was speared by natives while trying to deliver Bibles. It seemed like the same story, again and again. If the natives did not kill the missionaries right away, they were always eventually grateful to be saved.
This was when I learned to cheat, which was also a sin.
One day, I filled in all the wrong answers in my PACE and raised my American flag. I admit I was a bit scared. Miss Carter made her way around the room and eventually got to me. “Yes, Karen?” she said. She looked so tired.
“I need to go to the score table,” I said, afraid she would notice my answers were fakes. Then I would have to go and get swats. It was a huge risk, unlike anything I had done before. The missionaries made me do it.
“Okay, go ahead.” She nodded pleasantly. I took a huge gulp of air and brushed her as I got up. I discovered that cheating was not that difficult. In fact, it turned out this was how most of us survived. At the score table, I pulled out the grading key and memorized as many right answers as I could. Then I went back to my desk and erased all the old answers to put in the right ones. I got to have excellent short-term memory. I even won the citywide spelling bee.
But every sin comes with its punishment, and mine was boredom. There was nothing else in my cubicle besides PACEs and the Bible. I began to dream of the “garage sale” books my mom had bought because they were only a nickel. My sister still controlled them with her Dewey decimal system, but I decided to swipe one when she was not looking. To me, stealing did not seem as bad as cheating in the scheme of things. On the base everyone stole government supplies: calculators, pens, whatever. We were all family, after all, and believed we were government property. The stuff was not going anywhere. It could go back to the base when we died.
So my education proceeded from the Bible to books about women who dangled from a dark cliff or got trapped in a castle tower. It seemed Gothic romance novels could be had everywhere for only a nickel. One noblewoman who lived on the coast of Cornwall realized that someone wanted to kill her for her money. In the end, she got pushed off a cliff, but a mysterious man rode up on his horse to rescue her just in time. The problem was that she did not know if he was the killer, so she had to decide whether to take his hand or risk falling from the cliff. She made the right decision and chose the man, who pulled her up on his horse and kissed her hard, which meant he was not the killer. It reminded me of the Gene Kelly movies at home, where Gene danced as though he wanted to kiss someone and made me want to kiss him too. At home, I would hide in the closet and think of him, hoping my mother would not find me.
I would always have Gene and my invisible friend, Harvey. Yes, the rabbit, beneath the score table. He kept me company.
At school, I had to be sure to keep the book in my lap or under my PACE so no one could see me. Mr. Crackling would sometimes stop by my cubicle unannounced, squeezing his fat belly against my back, which grossed me out even though there was no getting away from him. He never caught me, though.
It was only when the girl in the next cubicle threw a note over my divider that our problems began. I knew her name was Lorinda, but that was all. She was blond and a whole foot taller than me, though only a year older. She also wore lip gloss and curled her hair, which made her kind of scary.
“What are you reading?” her note
said. Busted.
“Romance novel,” I wrote back, hoping she was not a stooge.
Another note came whizzing over. “Can I read it?”
I wrote back, “Okay. When I’m done.”
That was how Lorinda and I got to be friends during our fifteen-minute recesses—one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Sometimes we even talked to each other at lunch. Slowly, we became experts at covert ops and passed books between borders as in God’s Smuggler. Then we became more emboldened, even locking the monitor outside during recess once by putting a chair under the door handle inside. After that, we did our best to rearrange everything in the classroom. We put chairs on the score table and hung them from hooks on the walls. We scattered everyone’s PACEs all over the floors. It was a disinformation campaign. “Let’s turn everything upside down!” we had agreed.
In the end, we snuck out the back door so no one would know it was us. It was a triumph. We may actually have won the war, but Lorinda was not as good at hiding things as I was. I was the “good girl,” but her status was not as clear. So she fell under suspicion, vulnerable to attack.
The next morning, Mr. Crackling stopped by Lorinda’s cubicle and said, “Come with me to my office,” grabbing my book from her lap. I froze, waiting for him to grab me next. It seemed like hours before she came back, her face red but stiff with a glowing defiance. She nodded briefly in my direction as if to signify that she had not ratted me out, and Mr. Crackling never bothered me.
I had to wait until recess to find out what had happened.
“He made me pull down my underwear, lift my skirt, and lean over the desk,” she explained. “He said it would hurt more that way.”