The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

  I worried about it the whole next day, and the whole day Friday too. That’s all I did: worry, lie in bed, and eat myself into a stupor. As always, I went for anything sweet: apricot jam and Oreo cookies, chocolate chip ice cream drenched in pancake syrup, powdered sugar straight out of the box. My face and hair were covered with sugar, my precious robe spattered with chocolate, but I just kept shoveling it in—I couldn’t stop. Anna Marie didn’t care what I ate. She even helped me polish off the rest of the birthday cake.

  When everything obvious was consumed, I grabbed the box of raisin bran and picked out all the raisins. They tasted all the sweeter when I imagined Zach’s face in the morning.

  “Dad, she’s done it again,” he’d say, when he poured out his favorite cereal.

  My father would look sympathetic and shrug. No matter how many times they ordered me not to vandalize the raisin bran, the Black Beast wouldn’t let it alone. It amused him too much to antagonize Zach—a dangerous game, I thought.

  When I woke up Saturday morning, it was raining so hard that I was certain I’d been granted a reprieve. Surely no one would expect the students to go to confession in a torrent like this. But my father called the convent, and it was confirmed: if I didn’t go to confession, there would be no First Communion for me tomorrow.

  Southern California so rarely has weather, the thunder and lightning would have been thrilling if it had been just any old day. But that day, the storm seemed like proof of God’s displeasure with me, rattling my eardrums and stinging my skin. We had to drive so slowly on the slick, flooded roads that the trip to St. Madeleine’s took forever, and we passed a bad accident on the way. I was thoroughly frightened and miserable by the time we reached the church. Despite my entreaties, my father stayed in the car to smoke a Camel. “Give ’em hell, baby,” he said.

  Father Joseph had apparently been caught in the rain. His cassock was so wet it was streaming, leaving a dark trail behind him. The soaking hadn’t helped his disposition either, which even on the best of days was dour. “Line up!” he barked at the twenty or so shivering students waiting to confess. “No talking! No fidgeting! Contemplate your sins!” Probably none of us knew what “contemplate” meant, but like puppies listening to a master’s tone, we knew enough to stay quiet.

  I was one of the first in line, which was good because it meant I didn’t have too much time to think. The light over the confessional went off, and Johnny Zinn stepped out. He was the toughest kid in class, and he was in tears. “Next!” Father Joseph shouted.

  I stepped in, knelt, and crossed myself. It was dark and dank and close in there, the air a mixture of Johnny Zinn’s sweat and the incense lingering from the morning Mass. My body temperature began to rise, my heart began to flutter. As always, I worried that I would faint before Father Joseph could speak to me. I could hear him breathing through the screen; it sounded like he had a bad cold. Then he shot the secret panel back and said something in Latin. My cue.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins.”

  I’d already decided that I wouldn’t use the word suicide. Instead I would just state the facts and let Father Joseph come to his own conclusion. It wasn’t really a lie that way, just a softening of the truth. I took a deep breath and said, “I stole my mother’s diabetics.” Then I added in a rush, “And I took them all.” There, I’d said it. The ball was in God’s court now.

  I expected Father Joseph to be outraged. At the very least, I thought he’d ask me why I did it and then lecture me on the peril to my mortal soul. But there was silence on the other side of the panel, followed by a very great sneeze and a copious amount of nose blowing. When he finally spoke, he sounded congested and bored.

  “Stealing is a serious sin,” he said. I wondered how many times he had to say that in the course of a week’s confessions.

  “Yes, Father, I know.”

  “Search your heart, child. Are you truly sorry?”

  I searched my heart, but the truth was, my only real regret was that I hadn’t succeeded. So I decided to be sorry about that.

  “Yes, I’m truly sorry.”

  “Then I absolve you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” He assigned me penance: something like twenty Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. Mumbling another mouthful of Latin, he bid me to “go in peace and sin no more.” The panel slid shut, and I was free.

  I stepped out into a newly made world. The rain had stopped, and a single ray of sunshine pierced the Annunciation stained glass window, lighting up the altar and the very first pew. A man sat there, not kneeling, not praying, but nonchalantly reading the newspaper. I rushed to him and gave him a hug.

  “How’d it go, princess?”

  “Perfect. What’s that?” I pointed to a cardboard box at his side.

  “Another little birthday present for you. While you were in there”—he jerked his thumb toward the confessional—“I stopped by the convent to see Sister Mary Bernadette. I told her how concerned you were about not having the right paper for that latest homework assignment, and she gave me this.” He handed me the box.

  I opened it slowly, afraid to be disappointed. But I should have trusted the setting: God’s house, my father’s hands, that single ray of light. It was indeed a miracle: twenty, maybe thirty pages of clean manila paper, marked across with those thin blue lines that made it so easy for me to print to perfection. I would get that A-plus after all. My father wouldn’t leave me, at least not for the foreseeable future. I was so overwhelmed I sank down to my knees.

  “I have to say my penance now,” I said.

  But instead I gave thanks: for the paper, for my father’s thoughtfulness, for Sister Mary Bernadette’s generosity. For the sunlight, which was now beginning to flood all the stained glass windows. For surviving yet another day, despite my fears, despite my imperfections, and despite the Black Beast.

  My exaltation flickered for a moment. Who was the Black Beast, anyway, and why did he torment me so? Why did he make my moods plummet and soar, so quickly and intensely? Why did everything seem to matter so much? I looked over at Johnny Zinn, surreptitiously picking his nose in the next pew. I was sure he would never care enough about a homework assignment to want to kill himself. Why couldn’t I just be a normal kid?

  A shadow fell across the nave, and for a moment I shivered. But it passed, and the light that succeeded it was so brilliant, I let my dark questions be swallowed up for yet another day. I was only seven, after all. Maybe life would get simpler by the time I was eight. I decided to put off saying my penance, and reached up and tugged on my father’s sleeve.

  “I’m ready now,” I whispered.

  “That was fast,” he said. “You must not have been very bad.”

  I didn’t respond. Clutching my paper tight to my chest, I walked down the aisle, followed by the glittering eyes of saints.

  2

  The world is darkness, the only light

  The devil’s eyes, piercing my soul—

  I feel no remorse, I know this is right

  I sinned on earth, I must pay the toll.

  —Age ten

  Life did not get simpler at eight. Or at nine. My “spells” continued, and I racked up lengthy absences from school. Although these were difficult years, they were not especially memorable. Ten was different. Ten was a watershed year, exuberant and unforgettable. Life was all around me, begging to be seen, touched, tasted, inhaled. My senses had never felt so sharp. I could smell the neighborhood cur coming from half a block away. I could suck the secrets out of my mother’s oatmeal cookies, even the elusive nutmeg, with one bite. And nobody was faster at dodgeball.

  Lush as it was, there were times when I regretted this acute sensibility. Late at night, a branch scratching my bedroom window was a witch’s fingernail, trying to get at me. When the Santa Ana winds blew into town, my eyes glowed too bright and my skin felt like kindling, crisp and dry and ready to burn. One morni
ng, I took a walk through our backyard, and the beauty of the bougainvillea along the pool fence proved too much for me: I lay down in the grass and sobbed.

  At moments like this, my only real relief was in poetry. Everything I wrote was drenched in feeling. Despite the fact that I was so much more chipper at ten, a shocking percentage of my early writing was about death and dying and, as one title so aptly put it, “The Gloom Everlasting.” Writers are supposed to write what they know, but what could a child know about existential despair? Yet there it was, page after desperate page of it, screaming to get out of me. Like this poem that I wrote at age ten about the Black Beast—and showed to no one:

  My eyes are not wet

  And yet I am weeping—

  I sink with the weight

  Of the secret I’m keeping.

  I try to run, yet cannot move

  I turn to flee, yet find no door.

  I close my eyes to hide the sight

  And cover my ears to shut out the roar . . .

  They say in the Bible, look forward to Death

  Now I can laugh at the things I have read—

  What fools we stupid humans are

  I am dying, I am dead.

  But all my poetry couldn’t have been so morose, because my father thought it was wonderful. It was our closest bond. The minute Daddy got home from work, he’d toss his jacket on the kitchen chair and say, “Okay, baby, what did you write for me today?” Nothing else came first: dinner, my mother, Zach, the bills—they all had to wait until I handed over whatever I had written that day.

  Even though I knew he was biased, I basked in his praise. Deep down, I suppose I realized that his attention came at the expense of the family, but I was too happy to care. He was a grown-up, after all; he knew what he was doing. And what else could we talk about at the dinner table? This wasn’t meaningless triviality, like Zach’s obsession with go-carts or my mother’s infinite variations on who said what at work. This was Art.

  Most important of all, Father Tim agreed with my father: he thought my writing was special. Father Tim was the new priest at St. Madeleine’s—young and kind and so handsome he could have been a movie star. He was tall and slim and dark doe-eyed, like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. All the girls had a crush on him, including and especially me. He was my first thought in the morning, my last at night. I pictured him instead of Jesus when I prayed, which couldn’t have been good. I fantasized constantly about undoing his clerical collar, but I couldn’t quite figure out how I’d do it. Did it unbutton? Unsnap? Unzip? It became something of an obsession with me.

  Whatever Father Tim said, I believed. He did the smartest thing any mentor could do: he set me free to read. While the other students studied geography and fractions and current events, Father Tim turned me loose on the schoolyard grounds with his personal copy of Walden. Lord, how I came to hate Thoreau, but I slogged through it out of my devotion to Father Tim.

  Then, after his sermon one afternoon, Father Tim announced that at the end of the school year he would be moving on to a new parish in Africa. I was devastated, of course, and immediately turned to poetry to help mitigate my loss. I wanted to write him a farewell poem, something that he could keep with him always, next to his heart; something worthy of the great confidence he’d always shown in me. I remember the moment of inspiration: I was sitting in the backyard with pencil and paper, my back against my favorite elm. A leaf fluttered down at my feet—a young leaf, still green. I picked it up and played with it idly, wondering why it had met its end at such a tender age. It was still soft, still pliant: why?

  A sense of urgency came over me. Every second that I sat there was a second closer to Father Tim’s departure. Time pressed me like a vise, squeezing out each breath. I set the leaf down carefully and began to write what eventually turned into this:

  Humpty-Dumpty’s Final Stand

  Passing fast to memory

  Oblivion devours time

  A half-fogged haze enveloping

  Blank sheets of lovely empty rhyme.

  In mists of better, shades of sweet

  The hard and sourness compete

  To edge each other off the wall:

  A lost and long-lingering fall.

  Thus shaded, shrouded, past repair

  The aging times all muster troops—

  Press closely in the gathering gray,

  Rock silently on creaking stoops.

  As with much of my poetry at that age, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. There was only this need, this aching need, to put my feelings into words: to constrain them, somehow, with meter and rhyme. I suppose I knew of no other way to deal with my emotions, except to distance them through metaphor.

  Father Tim loved it—so much so that he typed up my childish scrawl and sent it off, along with a few of my other poems, to a professor at the nearby Claremont Colleges. A few weeks later, my father sat me down to announce the news: “Baby, you’re going to college.”

  An associate professor of English at Pomona College, a small but highly regarded liberal arts school, thought I showed promise. Professor Tremaine was willing to take me on for several hours each week, for private counseling, to audit his classes, and to attend lectures. The rest of the time, I’d go to my regular school. But still, I was terrified. “How will I get there, and who’ll take me home?” was all I could think of to say.

  Since both my parents worked, transportation logistics were already a nightmare. My parents parked us at all sorts of venues—ballet and tap and baton classes for me, the Boy Scouts for Zach, and when absolutely necessary, at the O’Learys’ house a few blocks away. Mrs. O’Leary always smelled like cooking sherry, and Mr. O’Leary snored on the couch for most of the day. Their son Dan, who was fifteen, wanted to be a rock star when he grew up. He had no interest whatsoever in me, except on those afternoons when everybody was elsewhere. Then he’d invite me to sit down on the couch with him, and he’d play me my favorite songs on his electric guitar, including, always, the incomparable theme from the Hawaii Five-O TV show.

  I could have listened to that song forever. It had a simple, driving pulse that I felt down deep in my body. “Again!” I’d beg Dan, but he would never agree—not unless “I did something for him first.” He’d grab my hand and take me into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he’d slide down his pants and his underwear, expose his penis and shake it at me. “Lick it,” he’d order.

  At ten, I knew nothing of the human anatomy. I was a shining example of the Catholic school system: devout and utterly ignorant. The first time Dan took me into the bathroom, the sight of his erect penis shocked and unnerved me. I recoiled, the warm, sour taste of nausea in my mouth. Did all men carry those things tucked inside their pants? Surely my father’s didn’t look like this, all red and raw and throbbing. It was ugly, and the Black Beast hated ugly things. I tried to go, but Dan had locked the door, and I had to fumble with the handle.

  “If you don’t do it, I’ll never play Hawaii Five-O for you again,” Dan said. He looked taller and meaner than he ever had before, and I was suddenly aware of the difference in our ages.

  “Do it, or else.”

  I hated ultimatums. But the thought of never hearing that song again, when all I had to go through was one moment’s disgust . . . Holding my nose, I leaned over and licked it. It was warm and spongy and slightly moist. Dan moaned, which frightened me.

  “Are you sick?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered. “But you have to go now.”

  “What about my song?”

  “Later.”

  “No, now.” I was outraged that he was trying to slip out of our deal. Tears of anger sprang to my eyes, but I quickly blinked them away. I’d be damned if I’d let him see me cry.

  Dan unlocked the door, but before he shoved me out, he put his face close to mine. I could smell the Fritos he’d eaten at lunch. “Swear,” he said.

  “Swear what?”

  “That you were never here.”

  “Bu
t I was here; I’m here right now.”

  “Swear, or I’ll tell everyone it was your idea. And I’ll never play you that song again.”

  I swore. What else could I do? But I kept two fingers crossed behind my back. I was pretty sure what we had just done was a sin, even though I’d acted with innocent intent. Which meant I’d have to confess it someday if I wanted to safeguard my soul.

  I ran out to the living room and waited at the piano stool, tapping my foot impatiently. It may seem odd that I still cared about the Hawaii Five-O theme after what had happened between us, but it was about far more than just the song now. Even at ten, I believed in the sanctity of contracts. I’d done what I’d done, and now it was his turn to perform.

  It seemed like eons before Dan eventually came out. I moved to the other side of the room, and we carefully avoided each other’s eyes. But he sat down and played Hawaii Five-O for me three times in a row, better than he’d ever played it before. Or maybe it just sounded better to me because now I knew its price.

  My sins weighed heavily on me in those days. At ten, I guess my soul was still so relatively spotless, I felt each black mark keenly. I was obsessive about confessing every week before taking communion. It was the only thing besides poetry that made me feel clean. But tell what I’d done with Dan O’Leary to my beloved Father Tim? What would he think of me then? I have to admit, only part of me was reluctant. The Black Beast was tantalized by the thought of spilling my dirty secrets to him.

  I knew the confessional was supposed to be an inviolate place, a direct line to the divine. But it was, after all, so small a space, and human beings in such close proximity can’t help but turn animal, sniffing each other out. So when I stepped into the confessional the following Friday, I was acutely aware of Father Tim’s presence, his warm breath through the screen, the freshly laundered scent of his vestments.