Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  BURNT

  OFFERINGS

  Turning Twelve

  Lucia Greenhouse

  “My little daughter lieth at the point of death: I pray thee, come and lay thy hands on her, that she may be healed; and she shall live.”

  . . . And [Jesus] took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise. And straightway the damsel arose, and walked; for she was of the age of twelve years. And they were astonished with a great astonishment.

  —Mark 42:5 (King James Version)

  I sat perched on a high stool in Aunt Helen’s kitchen, pulled my brown hair back into a ponytail, and waited, senses heightened, as Uncle Jack meticulously prepared to pierce my ears. He placed a white hand towel over my shoulders, like a barber might. He zipped open the black travel case holding his sterilized surgical tools, and methodically set them on the counter. He ripped open a new package of rolled sterile cotton, tore off two small pieces, and soaked them in a bowl of rubbing alcohol to swab my left earlobe, then my right, before promptly discarding the barely used cotton ball onto a specially designated dish. The process of using two cotton balls seemed at once both impressively expert and a tiny bit silly. How dirty could my earlobes have been?

  Uncle Jack was tall—six foot seven—with astonishingly blue eyes and close-cropped hair of indeterminate color. His skin was nicely tanned. He wore a pale pink golf shirt and khaki slacks with a needlepoint belt that Aunt Helen had probably stitched for him. On his feet were the same black Gucci loafers with the horse-bit buckles that my dad always wore.

  My uncle, Harry Alvin Johnson, MD—whom everyone called Jack—was a plastic surgeon, which I knew from my cousin Mimi meant that he made ladies’ boobs bigger and teenagers’ noses smaller and once sewed a girl’s ear back on after her horse bit it off. He also pierced all his nieces’ ears when they turned twelve.

  On that particular spring day shortly after my twelfth birthday, I didn’t pause for even a moment to wonder how it was that I was permitted to have my ears pierced, although today, decades later, it is something of a conundrum. What puzzled me at the time was the fact that my uncle, a plastic surgeon, was on one side of me, preparing to pierce my ears, and my mother was on the other side of me, acting as his assistant, swishing the shiny new gold post earrings in a dish of alcohol.

  It struck me, all of a sudden and possibly for the first time, that there might be something a little complicated about my uncle being a plastic surgeon and my mother, his sister, being a Christian Scientist. Actually, it struck me as maybe very complicated. After all, not only was Uncle Jack a surgeon, but my mother’s father, “Bops”—long dead—had been a family physician, and my grandmother, who now sat beside me, holding my smaller hand in her much larger bejeweled, powdery soft, knotty hand, had been a registered nurse way back when.

  And we didn’t believe in doctors.

  Maybe—maybe—almost everyone in the whole world went to doctors? Maybe we Ewings were weird? I eyed my mother skeptically, eyebrows raised, but she stood there casually and obediently swishing around the gold earrings in a dish of rubbing alcohol—sterilizing them—even though I knew from Christian Science Sunday School that there was no such thing as germs.

  Mom just smiled back at me, as though my expression were one of anticipation.

  Which it sort of was. What had started as puzzlement turned accusation became anticipation, then fear. I saw the syringe. My uncle pointed it straight up in the air and flicked it with his middle finger, and a little drop of clear liquid spurted out the end of the long, sharp needle. I had only seen this move executed on Marcus Welby, M.D., because we never went to doctors, not even for annual checkups. (Marcus Welby, M.D., was forbidden viewing in the Ewing household.) My heart raced.

  For years I had been captivated by the forbidden: St. Joseph Aspirin, peeing into Dixie cups (which my cousin Mimi told me about), and doctor visits with reflex tests (the ones with the rubber hammer to the knee) and tongue depressors and saying aaaah. But now, the moment had arrived for me to be seen—or treated, sort of—by a doctor. Suddenly, that needle spurting upward sent my wandering curiosity straight back to the safety of the familiar.

  A little voice whispered in my head. There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter.

  Grandma gave my hand a squeeze. “Are you scared?” she asked.

  I shook my head, no, but I was. My throat clenched and I tried to swallow. I knew from Sunday School that if I was afraid, I could quote the Bible or Science and Health, and my fear would go away.

  The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .

  The problem was, whenever I thought of the twenty-third Psalm, my eyes got watery. If I were to carry on with He leadeth me beside the still waters, I might soon be crying. I switched back to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, to the Scientific Statement of Being.

  “All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-All.”

  Uncle Jack approached me with the syringe.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my posture retreating.

  “I’m numbing your ears with Novocain.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “You’ll feel a pinch. But then, after a few minutes, you won’t feel anything. That’s when I’ll pierce your ears.”

  I felt the pinch, and then a sting. Uncle Jack hadn’t mentioned anything about stinging. I squeezed my eyes shut and returned to my mental recitation.

  “Spirit is immortal Truth. Matter is mortal error . . . ”

  A few minutes later, Uncle Jack pulled and tugged at one ear, then the other. I felt—or rather, I heard, but didn’t feel—a popping sound.

  “There you go, Lucia, you can take a look,” he said, pointing to a mirror on the far wall. He winked at my mother.

  Sliding off the high stool, I approached the mirror as though I were balancing a book on my head.

  On the wall I saw my toweled shoulders covered in thick blood dripping from two very large needles—poles, really—sticking through my earlobes. I gasped, horrified. I felt my stomach turn.

  “Jack, you bully,” Mom said.

  I’m sure my uncle thought it was a funny joke, but I wasn’t laughing and neither was Mom.

  “Come on back,” he said, sheepishly.

  Within seconds, Uncle Jack inserted the earrings into the holes made by the poles, and snapped on the backings. He took a few more alcohol-drenched cotton balls to clean up my bloody ears, removed the towel from my shoulders, and sent me outside to show the boys.

  My little brother, Sherman, and my cousins, Harry, Steven, and Sargent, were taking turns going off a bicycle jump they had constructed on the driveway. I asked if they wanted to see my newly pierced ears, but they didn’t. My cousins had seen puffy lobes before, and Sherman was far more interested in the jump. I asked if I could have a go. After ignoring me for a few more loops, Sherman reluctantly gave me the bike he was using. I headed toward the ramp of the jump at full speed.

  What happened next is a bit of a blur. I was flat on my back. Above me I could see, in the foreground, Uncle Jack squatting on my right, holding my wrist and looking at his watch. On my left, my mother kneeled. Her eyes were closed, and her lower lip was firmly pinched between her teeth. Between Uncle Jack and Mom, directly behind me, stood my grandmother, with one hand over her mouth. I heard her utter the word concussion.

  Uncle Jack asked how I felt, and he ran his fingers over my forehead and scalp. I winced. My head throbbed as he found the bump at my hairline above the right eye. Mom opened her eyes and gazed off into the near distance. I could tell from the way her head bobbed very slightly that she was deep in prayer, affirming the Truth about Man’s God-given perfection. When one of my cousins told Uncle Jack that the handlebars of the bike had given way as I went off the jump, and I had launched headfirst into the concrete, it became apparent to me that it was my God-given perfection my mother was affirming.r />
  My mom’s focus turned to me, and my eyes filled with tears. I felt sick to my stomach and, oddly, like I had done something wrong.

  “Would you like to go home?” Mom whispered gently.

  I nodded, and started to sit up, which was a bad idea because everything turned topsy-turvy, like it used to in the fun house at the Excelsior Amusement Park (which for me was never much fun). I returned to lying on one side, my hands serving as a pillow for my cheek, the pebbles digging unpleasantly into them.

  Grandma turned away from me and said something to Aunt Helen, who had finished scolding the cousins for the bicycle ramp. Uncle Jack and Mom had words—but I heard none of them. I wanted the bad feeling to go away and thought closing my eyes would help. It didn’t. It just made things worse.

  “You okay, Loosh?”

  Sherman, not quite ten, knelt beside me and uncharacteristically took my hand in his.

  Eventually I did get up, and we returned to Mom’s station wagon and drove home. I got to sit in the front seat, which should have felt like a privilege but didn’t. I put my head in my mom’s lap and she drove one-handed, rubbing my back with her right hand. Sherman and Mom sang the five verses of “Oh, Gentle Presence,” which we all knew by heart, and when they got to the last line, “and Mother finds her home and heavenly rest,” we were pulling into our driveway. I felt a little better.

  Mom settled me in my parents’ room, in the high four-poster bed with the pretty canopy. Then she excused herself to call Dad from the phone in his adjacent study. I heard fragments of her end of the brief conversation: Ears pierced. Bike jump. Tumble. Concussion.

  I knew from the silence that my father was probably correcting my mother, reminding her not to use such a word.

  “Mm-hmm,” my mother said, “Yes.”

  She hung up the phone and dutifully dialed again. I listened for each rotation of the dial—short for low numbers, long for the higher numbers, the zzzzzzz of the dialing much faster than the clicking of the return—and wondered whom she was calling.

  “Mary?” she said, “It’s Joanne Ewing.”

  It used to be that we called Mrs. Hannah whenever we had a “little problem,” but ever since Dad himself became a Christian Science practitioner, he handled all but the most serious matters that arose in our family. Mom and Dad must have been worried about the possibility of . . . that word . . .

  Physically, I didn’t actually feel all that bad. My head hurt—but it was only a dull ache now, unless I touched the bump with my fingers. Then it stung. If I turned my head quickly, I felt seasick. So I tried not to move.

  My mother didn’t use concussion with Mrs. Hannah. She gave her most of the other details though, about the bicycle jump and the handlebars and the ear piercing by Jack. After a few minutes of silence (in which Mrs. Hannah was praying and instructing, and Mom was listening, and I was imagining what the worst-case scenario might be for a concussion), Mom called out to me from the next room and asked me to pick up the phone on the nightstand.

  “Hello, dear,” Mrs. Hannah said. She had the voice of a Disney character, high, nasal, and singsong. Hearing it made me feel sad again.

  “Your mom tells me you took a little spill?” she asked sweetly.

  “Yes.” My throat ached as I tried to sound brave.

  “Can you tell me what you’re working on in Sunday School?”

  I had to think about that. I had no idea, to be honest. But she would never know, nor would she check with my teacher, so I gave her a plausible, made-up answer.

  “The seven synonyms for God?” I offered.

  “Very good. And what does Mary Baker Eddy say are the seven synonyms for God?”

  That was easy. “Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love.”

  “And what is the Truth about you, Lucia?”

  “The Truth is, I cannot be hurt.”

  “You’re absolutely right. Why is that?”

  “Because I am the perfect reflection of God. And God is perfect. Therefore, I am perfect.”

  “That’s right. You can hold fast to that thought, Lucia. Have you learned Mrs. Eddy’s definition of Man?”

  I closed my eyes, to search my memory, but that made me feel gross, so I opened them again. I was pretty sure I knew the definition, but not positive.

  “The . . . compound idea of . . . infinite spirit?” I said.

  “Very good. That’s the first part. And what else?”

  “The . . . spiritual image and likeness of God? The full representation of Mind?”

  “That’s right. Do you know what that means?”

  “I think . . . it means . . . ”

  If I told Mrs. Hannah that it meant I could not be anything but perfect, I’d be giving the right answer. But I couldn’t get the words out; they just wouldn’t come. Out of nowhere, I felt utterly exhausted. Holding the phone to my ear required an effort I simply couldn’t make. I let the hand piece of the phone go so that it rested on the pillow a few inches from my ear. Mrs. Hannah’s voice became the squeak of a mouse. I felt strangely far away from myself. I tried to concentrate on Mrs. Hannah’s voice.

  “Mrs. Eddy says: “When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, ‘I am hurt!’” Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real. Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics.”

  It struck me as odd, suddenly, that our practitioner—and Mom and Dad, and every other Christian Scientist I knew—used the present tense when quoting Mrs. Eddy, as though the founder of Christian Science were still alive. But Mrs. Eddy was dead.

  Or maybe she wasn’t dead. I mean, I knew she was not dead—because in Christian Science, there was no death. But, I was sort of confused. If Mary Baker Eddy wasn’t dead—because there’s no death in Life—then that meant Abraham Lincoln was also not dead. Right? I wondered if Mrs. Hannah would say, “Abraham Lincoln says . . . ” if she were quoting him. Or if she would say, “Abe Lincoln said . . . ”

  “Lucia?” Mary Hannah asked.

  “Yes?” I said, jolted back to the present.

  “The Scientific Statement of Being?”

  Together, we recited it, which required no thinking.

  There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter. All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-All. Spirit is immortal Truth. Matter is mortal error. Spirit is real and eternal. Matter is unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is his image and Likeness. Therefore, man is not material, he is spiritual.

  WHEN DAD GOT HOME from work that evening he carried me to my own bedroom, like he used to when I was a little girl. He made a show of it—all handsome and movie-star-like—and that alone cheered me up. But I didn’t touch the dinner Mom brought me on a tray. I wasn’t hungry.

  I pinched the lobes of both ears (which now ached a bit) and marveled at the return of sensation. I knew from Sunday School that there was no sensation in matter. But, what about my earlobes? The Novocain had made sensation in my ears disappear. And then, after the Novocain wore off, I could feel them again.

  And what about Abe Lincoln? (And everyone else who ever lived? Except maybe . . . Jesus?)

  Was he really still living?

  Nothing made much sense.

  And what about concussions? What if I had one? Could I die from a concussion? Should Mom and Dad have taken me to the hospital?

  The next morning at breakfast I felt perfectly fine. I sat at the kitchen table, eating my breakfast of Quisp cereal with one hand while the other hand gently twisted my earrings one rotation each. My ears were sore and unpleasantly crusty, but I adored my earrings. They made me look so much older than I had the day before.

  Dad bounded down the stairs, singing, “Oh what a beautiful morning,” and then he was standing behind me, affectionately sq
ueezing my shoulders.

  “You’ve had a beautiful demonstration,” he said. “If you like, you can come with Mom and me to next Wednesday’s Testimony Meeting and share it.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I fiddled with one of my earrings.

  “Would you like to?” Dad asked.

  I knew it would mean a trip to Baskin-Robbins. I looked up at the ceiling, pondering the offer.

  “And you know, now that you’re twelve,” Dad added, charmingly, “you can join the Mother Church.”

  Touch

  Elise Glassman

  “Ready to go?” My mother stood between me and the library checkout counter.

  Startled by her sudden appearance, I shifted my armload of books, moving the top book to the bottom of the stack I’d prepared for checkout. My sister and I were homeschooled and Mom had to approve everything we read, even books by Christian authors.

  She picked up the top book. “Another detective novel? I sure hope there’s no swearing in this one.” Last week I’d had to return Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage because she’d opened to a page where Hastings uttered “goddamn.” She moved on to a collection of Greek plays. Soon she’d get to the bottom of the pile, to The Book. I felt sick to my stomach. If she opened it, if she read what I’d just read—

  My sister Maggie ran up. “Mom. The meter maid’s coming.”

  Mom said, “Oh dear—well, go ahead and check out. We’ll see you at the car.”

  That night, after Maggie turned out the lamp on her side of the bedroom, I stayed up reading The Book: Deenie, by Judy Blume. It was, without a doubt, a book my mother would never have allowed me to read. But it drew me right in, with its easygoing prose describing the nonchalant grittiness of growing up in a city, and Deenie getting dragged by her mom to modeling jobs. And then boom—here was Deenie, in the bathtub, touching herself. My hands went cold as I read. I felt my pulse pound in my ears. How did someone else know about this? I did this, too, I touched myself, but I had no idea other girls did it. Reading about Deenie and her “special place” made my face hot with shame. I read the passage again and again. Did touching myself make me a bad Christian? Would I go to hell? I hadn’t planned on searching out The Book at the library and sneaking it home, but here it was. Now, lying in bed, I held The Book with one hand and, with the other, I slipped my fingers into the waistband of my underpants and stroked the warm, liquid place between my legs.