by Lorraine Ray
The confirmation class met in the donated home, the church annex, where Mother left me in the autumn through spring, ever Sunday night from four to five-thirty in 1971. I came home in the dark, to the food already cooked in the time I had spent, or wasted I felt, on the Bible studies necessary for confirmation. What a mass of uninteresting names and things I couldn’t remember. The culmination of nonsense and irrelevancy. I could have done a thousand good deeds in the time I had spent on these confirmation lessons.
The uninteresting arguments of theological issues, the horridly boring comments on Biblical controversies that this visiting reverend and Reverend Shelton discussed above our heads, through us, around us, not including us at all and laughing while we studied sullenly, the tan folding chairs which filled our church and had now migrated to the annex. We sat in the living room of the house. A dusty white shag rug covered the linoleum floor. A sliding glass door without curtains showed our figures on the glass as the darkness spread in the backyard. Another fine Sunday afternoon spent with these decrepit men talking to each other in the presence of nine teenagers who were never allowed to talk. And these guys were so animated with each other and even discussed with us that they would go to dinner and eat lamb that night together, the details of the menu, who would have mint sauce and who horseradish. They had to discuss food in front of us who were eating our dinners late every Sunday and felt the loss acutely because none of us had made the choice to go to confirmation class on our own. We were all forced into the class, even those much more pliant than me. “There are aspects of the gospel which are meant to challenge in the same way that we discussed the challenge of the aspects of love and charity. In full acknowledgement of the gospels true meaning in our lives we are incessantly and obsessively looking for an out. Would anyone care to discuss this, with pertinent examples from the scripture, which we are studying tonight? Anyone willing at all to discuss the way we are all looking for an out?”
Yeah, I’m looking for an out, sir. An out from this confirmation class which I do not want to attend where I have to listen to these ridiculous arguments about the Bible from two ancient farts and I can’t say anything at all about what I want to say because my mother wants me confirmed regardless and I better conform to get confirmed.
All of us in the class cast our eyes down, into the dusty corners of the room, to the labels on the back of the folding chairs, to the weird darkening backyard with its abandoned swing set, the patio walls thick with pyracanthus berries, and near the weird shaking Eucalyptus trees, a transplanted saguaro standing awkwardly in the yard, about as awkwardly as us in a confirmation class.
“Anyone with anything they’ve observed. Don’t be shy.” The two men almost laughing aloud at the young meek girls, who had nothing to say. Then, struck that the boys are not beating the girls, urging the boys at least to have something to say to better the hopeless, quiet girls, which they didn’t either. We stared out morosely at the brick patio with its huge barbeque and discussed the aspects of the gospel that they liked. None of us asked much of anything and we dreaded being pumped for our opinions of anything that the Reverends talked about.
The next Sunday, my last Sunday at church, Shirley Shelton stood on the Bermuda lawn clutching her purse and fingering her clip-on earrings. The blankness of her astounded me again. I always was astonished by her, actually appalled. Where was she? Was she off with her Maker somewhere and the body here simply serving the only purpose of keeping me disturbed and pleasing her mother, the Reverend Shelton’s wife?
“We will have a party thrown by the congregation when you have successfully interviewed with Reverend Shelton and we have you ready for the ceremony.”
The absolute misery of the dark Sunday nights spent in the church annex in December and January. The sad clowns and dolls in a twilight bedroom where the church nursery is at times for those children who are tiny or sick. The dripping bleary nights of cold when we waited for our car to advance enough for us to get in out of the rain. To the annex, the strange donated house with its empty bedrooms and stripped aspect. A kitchen for no one. A barbeque without meaning. A perpetually still swing set. The meaningless entryway with its fake slate floor. The doorbell that will never be used again.
“You get confirmed tonight, isn’t it?” Mrs. Shelton said stiffly. After all these years, can she afford me no morsel of goodwill or affection? I sat beside her mentally retarded daughter for a decade without a single complaint, well, only a complaint inside, which God has dutifully marked down and I have been found wanting, not wanting saliva dripped on my hand, not wanting to see her go into her house, not wanting to hear her wails up close and personal and not wanting to take responsibility for something that was clearly not my responsibility. Mrs. Shelton was in my opinion a representative of the religion I was getting confirmed in, and a very bad representation at that. She made me think being a Christian would be a contemptible thing. But why didn’t I see that Reverend Shelton was much kinder. And why didn’t I cut Mrs. Shelton any slack for the fact that she had Shirley, which must have made her question God’s intentions toward her. No wonder she acted always as though she faced a hostile God.
“Yes, tonight”
“Well, you can sit with Shirley all through the worship today. You won’t go off to Sunday School now that you’ll be confirmed.” Oh boy, I thought. Joy, rapture. I didn’t have to leave and miss the sermon. Little did they know that I never wanted to hear another sermon. I planned to graduate from Sunday school and church in one fell swoop.
Mrs. Shelton left us like a dark menace. She never failed to make unpleasant remarks about the things that mattered most to people.
“And you don’t have to come to church anymore at all, if you don’t want to,” said Mother, rather bitterly, knowing, I guess, what my decision was going to be. She waited to say this quietly after Mrs. Shelton departed.
“Well, I don’t think I will, not for a bunch of weeks at least.” I said this nicely enough, but crisply. Of course my plan was for this couple of weeks to last my entire life.
“Suit yourself, but I wish you’d come down off your high horse.”
I didn’t want to remain near Mother after church as she went again to see Molly C., but the dark, open church door worried me more than the distaste I felt visiting the church office. When we approached the Dutch door I could see that the denizen of the church office sat on a chair, more crippled than a decade earlier, more roly-poly, dressed in an old fashioned wool houndstooth suit, clip-on earrings, but the same lady with the same Midwest attitude. She had the same bowl of offerings which she was methodically snapping open and dumping. “Well, hi Juney,” she said. “Is this your youngest girl?”
“Yes, it is. She has a little acne… She’ll be confirmed tonight.”
“Well, isn’t that nice. I suppose we’ll be seeing you in church every week from now on.”
I’m ashamed to say I thought to myself, “The old fool thinks I’ll be in church, but she’ll be wrong about that.” Smug was the way I’d describe my feelings inside. I didn’t feel the least sad about what I thought. I didn’t regret fooling Molly, nor feel nostalgia for all the times, the Sunday mornings, when I saw her in the little safe church office counting the offerings. I only felt aggressively angry that she had presumed that I would be at church, but what else could she have expected since I was allowing myself to be confirmed. Wouldn’t it have been more honest to have fought harder against confirmation if I really hadn’t wanted it? I didn’t even have the moral strength to stand up for my ideals. I never argued my points. I simply let myself be run over by Mother and then internally laughed at the church lady who thought my confirmation was genuine.
I smiled blankly and didn’t answer her. I felt Mother bristle next to me. Did she expect me to lie?
“And how are the folks?” Molly asked kindly. She was still breaking open the offering envelopes and piling up the bills. Coins clinked into the bowl and she reached for a new envelope every few seconds. Her hands were shakier t
han I had remembered and her skin more pale. She wrote notes in a ledger book about the offerings.
“I hate to say it but they are pleased as punch that Nixon was reelected. Not my older brother, he’s the Democratic chairman of the town. And my mother was an adamant supporter of Kennedy.”
“Oh, I think you told me that once. Well, well.”
“Oh, it’ll all come out in the wash.”
I noticed again with chagrin and horror that Mother said “worsh” instead of “wash.” I hated her nasal Midwest accent. Molly had a similar one. It was agony to have to stand there and listen to them mispronounce words.
“We visited in the summer. The kids all went to see that new Romeo and Juliet movie at a drive-in in Markle,” Mother said.
“Isn’t that nice. All the cousins together?”
“Even this one went. She wanted to. I think the boys only wanted to see the girl naked. But I support Shakespeare.”
“And well you should, Juney, didn’t you practically read them all you told me? Well, isn’t that interesting. In central Indiana. How did you like it back there?” She spoke to me. I think it was the first and last time she ever said anything to me, though I had seen her all those times, though she had seen me taking care of Shirley and never said thank you at all. But why did I want a thank you from her now that I was leaving the church with its prim ladies, gobble necks and Mexican straw purses?
“It was great. I know a lot about Indiana now.”
“She doesn’t,” said Mother snappily. “She wasn’t friendly enough to her Indiana cousins. She thought she was too good for everything there. Superior. They know how to be friendly to others,” she said this as though I pointedly didn’t know how to be friendly. I should have been hurt, but I didn’t let it get to me. I didn’t want her to get a victory out of the situation. I was too happy to know that I would be confirmed and then never have to go to church again.