Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  “Ricky, come on!”

  He was working with an electric sander in his garage, always playing with band saws and car jacks and chain saw engines while his four-year-old brother mixed cement nearby.

  “Marty!” he hollered to his brother over the growl of the motor, “hit this board a couple times with the nail gun!” Then he paused to consider me through safety goggles.

  “The stripper has to take everything off,” I told him. “Everything.”

  How did I know what a stripper was? Oh, I had an idea. I was a high-powered magnet for scraps of information.

  My mom had taken us once to a lady who ran a hair salon out of her kitchen, and there on her coffee table was a stack of glossy magic otherwise known as Playboy. Kate and I had hovered around the massive powder-laden breasts, covering our mouths with the kind of prudish shock that would’ve made Caroline Ingalls proud. I longed to peek inside, but Jesus paralyzed me in His loving force field and held me fast, then the lady came and gathered them up in a flurry.

  “Sorry, I’m not used to having kids around,” she told my mom.

  Mom gave us a loaded look, Can you believe how tacky? But oh, I longed to meet more tacky people like her. People who had stacks of Playboys lying around the couch like Better Homes and Gardens. Christians, on the other hand, did their best to ignore Song of Solomon, which was the only book in my Children’s Bible with no illustrations, but it was packed with innuendo about pillars, gazelles, and spices wafting out of people’s gardens.

  Ricky summed up my shapeless form and agreed to the strip show.

  “Okay. Break time.”

  It had to be done in a hurry, a pusher waving addicts into the back room to do the deal. I gave them a two-forone price and pranced back and forth on the back of the couch, humming a burlesque tune, kicking off pieces of clothes on the downbeat. Once it was all off, I swear I heard Jesus weeping, and my song seemed more like the high-pitched squeal of a boiling crab, or perhaps the inner tube of my soul deflating on Satan’s tack. I jumped down and hightailed it to the closet, covering both sides of my ass.

  “Show’s over!” I said, slamming the doors closed in Ricky’s face.

  He was having a good laugh, eyes gleaming, mistaking my escape into the closet as part of the act. He set to banging the door down, trying to pry it open with his fingernails, until a light flicked on at the top of the stairs and my mother asked what was going on.

  “Hide-and-seek,” he called back.

  “Please don’t bang on the closet doors. Where’s my daughter?”

  “Don’t know,” Ricky called back, covering his little brother’s mouth.

  She’s in here, my conscience cried out. She’s stripping naked and doing incredibly exciting things that will bring great shame to her family.

  Who knew this inner, ethereal orb known as the conscience could hurt so bad? The next day, I opened my dresser drawer to find the same sailboat halter top I’d worn as a stripper. There it was, neatly washed and folded by my mother. All innocent and waiting to be worn again.

  Something wrong? It asked me.

  I backed away, stunned and reeling. It was a lump of Satan’s kryptonite.

  At night, the shame blossomed. People’s butts, my feverish thoughts moaned over and over, people’s butts are so sinful.

  The parts you want to show most are the ones you have to work hardest to cover, explained the Lord, as He placed a pair of peach-colored buttocks on the felt board altar. Bind it tight, child! Bind it!

  God said He’d forgiven me, but clearly it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t forgive myself. Guilt loomed around every corner, dragging behind me everywhere I went, like my Fisher-Price turtle-on-a-string. I was bad. I was a bad girl. How could I purge this ache in my chest, this heavy noose of sin around my neck, and get back to being awesome and good again?

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything I’d been taught, including the Bible, Little House, and Guiding Light, pointed to one thing: dirty secrets could be absolved only when confessed to the one person you wanted to tell the least, and who probably also did not want to know.

  That would be my dad.

  “I did something,” I mumbled to him one night, after lights-out. “I did something bad with Ricky.”

  “Who’s Ricky?” Dad asked.

  He was sitting on the edge of my bed, no tie, but still in his dress shirt. Since he was always away on business trips to the far corners of the earth, he often had to be refreshed on the cast members of my life.

  “The boy across the street.”

  “Oh.” He yawned. “Okay.”

  “I took off my shorts…” I continued, the words stuck in my mouth. “I took them off.”

  “And… what? He saw your underpants?” Dad, always the optimist.

  “No,” I said.

  “He saw your backside?” So upbeat and calm, like the pilot on the intercom as the plane goes down.

  “My front side too,” I squeaked, hoping if I put a touch of wonder in my voice—golly, Pa—perhaps it would go down easier.

  “So, you showed Ricky your bottom?”

  Bottom! Yes! Such a silly, wonderful, all-encompassing word, we could just as easily have been discussing the bookcase, the bottom shelf, the bottoms of our hearts.

  “Yes, my bottom,” I said, letting the tears flow so he would take it easy on me.

  “It’s okay,” came the bewildering answer. “But boys and girls need to keep that private.”

  Okay? I thought. Okay?? It must be Dad’s new job. His senses must be dulled by the high blood pressure. Or maybe my nudity still qualified as cute, like the little girl on the Coppertone bottle. So we said prayers, and I added a silent one that God would help me with the last fruit of the spirit, the dreaded self-control. Please keep my Fruit of the Looms covering the fruit of my loins, in Jesus’s name, amen!

  In the morning, there was a letter from my dad, who now believed his prolonged absences had totally screwed me up. The note taped to my bunk bed had a heart and an arrow through it, telling me he would never stop loving me.

  Clutching my pass, thanks to my possibly underinformed and secular-leaning father, I was back to enjoying life one day at a time when Nathaniel, whose desk faced mine at Heritage Christian, told me he would show me his ding-a-ling if I showed him my cooter.

  “My what?”

  “You know what,” he said.

  Sure, Ms. White had left the classroom for a minute, and Jesse was out sick, but I wasn’t going down the road of naughty fun and excitement again. Oh, no. Not that. I had a reputation here. I was popular and respected. But I had tasted sin and wanted more. Just a little bit. Just a smidge.

  “You go first,” I whispered. I looked around to see if anyone else suspected. My girlfriends were distracted, coloring in their workbooks at other tables.

  Under the desk I saw nothing, just Nathaniel’s dark blue polyester knees, his hands fumbling in his shadowy crotch.

  “Did not!” I said, sitting up.

  “I did too. Look.”

  “No!”

  “You have to show me yours now.”

  “Mine?” I said, intrigued. I had had a dream about this very situation, not long ago, where I was standing in class and dropped my drawers for everybody. I was filled with a sensation like I’d peed my pants, but way better. I woke up to dry sheets. It was definitely not the Holy Spirit.

  “Just for two seconds,” I told Nathaniel, “and that’s it.” While Jesus gathered up His scrolls and headed for the hills again, I stared directly at the board, hooked my arms into my dress, and you know, just sort of aired things out a bit.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Look now.”

  Nathaniel disappeared under the table and came up with a dull thud, knocking his head. His face had changed, dropped. Hmm. Maybe he didn’t have sisters.

  “I saw it,” he said. And then: “I’m telling.”

  I watched him get up and walk to the door to await the teacher’s return.<
br />
  “Nathaniel, please don’t, please don’t,” I mouthed to him from my chair, the horror thick as tar. Oh, Jesus. Help me.

  Nathaniel’s face was pained, his clip-on tie askew. Moses stood at his back with a skewer of heathen babies and a pissed-off flaming bush. Report her, ya little wussy.

  “I have to tell,” Nathaniel whispered back to me. “I have to.”

  “Please…” I whispered. “No.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked my friend Jenny, alarmed by my crumpling, reddened face. “Something’s wrong,” she alerted my devoted crew. “We need to see if she’s okay!”

  “It’s nothing,” I whispered back to all their staring faces, shooing them away. “Nathaniel’s just being mean.”

  “You need me to punch him?” Linda asked, twisting over her chair, loud enough so he could hear.

  “Be nice to her or else,” threatened Mia, “her boyfriend will be really mad.”

  “She is bad,” he snapped back at the girls, and my heart sank. They looked at me, questioning, unable to identify my sin, blinded by my flawlessly feathered hair.

  It was too late. The teacher returned, the class hushed, and Nathaniel walked over to her desk, confessing quietly, shifting in his loafers, the whites of his eyes flashing as he tilted his head in my direction. No one could hear what they were discussing, but I knew the end was near. If only I was the girl who gets held down in the woods, I thought, and gets forced to lift her skirt. Then everybody would feel sorry for me. But no, I was the girl who begged passersby to please undress me with your eyes. My life was an episode too perverted even for Little House. Now my chin was quivering. My neck bent over my construction paper cross, which I no longer had the life force to paste together. I sat and awaited the loving axe of my Savior.

  Ms. White asked aloud if I would please stay after class to speak to her. What would I do? What would I do when she referred to my bottom? My privates. Maybe she would read me a Bible verse. I’d get a U for Unsatisfactory. An H for Hellbound.

  “Were you being inappropriate with Nathaniel?” she asked, after the room had cleared. That word. Worse than unsaved or unclean—anything was better than such a particularly willful and offensive brand of queer as inappropriate.

  “No!” The tears threatening. “No I didn’t. Nathaniel lied.” Tension ebbed from Ms. White’s face. Lying was definitely more tolerable than anything involving panties or a penis.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll have to call your parents about this.”

  Dread seized me. I had no escape; I’d have to lie. Lie like I’d never lied before. I would lie so hard I would reverse the past, turn the world back on its axis, like Superman.

  When my mom got the call, I hid behind the couch, soothing myself with the striped upholstery pattern. Blue, tan, brown. Blue, brown, tan. Little fuzzy lines in between. I traced them with my finger.

  “What is this about Nathaniel?” Mom asked me after she hung up.

  “He lied about me,” I said, casual-like.

  She stood there looking down at me.

  “I don’t know why he lied about something like that,” I said. “That is so disgusting.”

  I explained my side of the story, the one where my bottom was in a deep, ageless sleep, swaddled in privacy and correctness. I was practically perched around Jesus’s feet like a pleasant robotic virgin on a commercial for heaven.

  A parent conference was called. Dad would attend as my emissary.

  Before work one morning, he came into school early in his suit and tie, smiling at me and my classmates in the hallway as he passed. We were standing around in the foyer before the bell. His smart camel trench coat turned down the hall and disappeared into Ms. White’s lair, where no children could go until seven fifty. Dad was so tall and dapper. This impromptu visit would’ve been another excuse to bask in self-worship, if only it was Bring Your Parent to School Day. Instead it was Become an Unwitting Pawn in the Evil Web of Lies Concocted by Your Pleasure-Seeking Daughter Day. But I could just hear him, brandishing his shiny black hair and British accent like a magic wand.

  Ultimately, I was right. The teacher believed me, because really. What kind of girl would take off her panties under the desk? Not one like me, who had a trophy for the most memorized catechisms in her class. Everyone concurred: it must be dirty, crotch-obsessed Nathaniel. He was swarthy, and his dad didn’t sound a thing like Prince Charles.

  During our daily Bible studies, Ms. White had once told our class that if we balled up our fist and pointed it at hell, hell being the floor, then it could block Satan from tempting us. Like a shield. For months post-Nathaniel, I’d been knuckling the devil into the throw rug, but my lie still weighed like a stone in my chest: 2–0, Satan in the lead. My righteousness was hemorrhaging.

  I’d see something funny on TV, but before I could laugh, my sin reared its head.

  Remember how you lied? Hmm, life’s not so funny now, is it.

  I’d be setting up a music concert for my Smurf collection in the living room, and there it was: a ticking time bomb in my chest.

  You showed him your butt and lied.

  No matter how seemingly sweet and innocent my day was, it was but a smear of pink icing on a mountain of impacted crap. I would have to come clean. Otherwise hell, like Pat Benatar sang, really was for children.

  “Mom,” I blurted out one night before she went back downstairs. “I lied about Nathaniel. I really did show him my bottom.”

  Mom considered me, then turned around and kept going.

  “This again,” she said. “You know what? I don’t want to hear it. Honestly.”

  I trailed behind her, wiping my tears, relieved that the truth had set me free, and that Mom was not quite godly enough to refresh my teacher on the facts.

  “Don’t come crying to me,” she called back, heading into the kitchen, “because I don’t want to hear it.” She snapped on rubber gloves to scour at the sink, a metaphor for my indiscretions. Connecticut, she scrubbed. Is a fine place. Scraping harder. To raise children.

  I backslid only one time after that. With Mia, one of my many adoring little fans. At her house one day, we got naked from the waist down so we could slap our naked butts together to the Bee Gees. We would do this while jumping on the bed in her room with the door locked, squealing and laughing like hyenas. Originally, this had been my brilliant idea, but Mia, who believed I was God’s gift to Christianity, caught on quickly. It wasn’t long before she asked for naked butt slapping by name.

  “Let’s do it,” she’d whisper in my ear, so close I could feel her warm breath on my cheek. She giggled with excitement as we undressed in her room.

  But something was very wrong. We were having too much fun. Which meant we were probably being tempted. I paused to consider the sunlight filtering through her white curtains. It wasn’t golden and peaceful, it was God’s X-ray vision. He was watching us. Mia’s warm, smooth skin bumping up against my naked ass wasn’t soft and sublime like I’d first thought; it was more like Satan stomping on the Holy Spirit’s head with steel-toed cowboy boots. And the Holy Spirit wasn’t just air, according to my Bible Workbook—the Holy Spirit was actually God’s pet dove! There were feathers everywhere. Invisible bloody feathers! All because I had been tempted by yet another bottom!

  “Gotta stop,” I told her, getting down off the bed, pulling on my corduroys, and pointing my fist squarely at hell. I looked up at Mia’s flushed, disappointed face. “I can’t do it anymore. It’s… bad.”

  “Oh,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes, wondering when it was that I’d become such a boring, uptight turd.

  Right then, as I was zipping up my fly, I decided I should be a doctor. It was a rightful end to all this silliness. I would get a license, and then I could peek and peer at all my patients’ privates while they held still and counted ceiling tiles. I wouldn’t be grabbing them and holding them down in the woods. I’d merely be within my rights as a professional.

  Until such time, I woul
d hog-tie my sinful impulses, gag them and sit on them and hum and count to a hundred. I would not be like Lot’s wife in Genesis 19:26, who committed the worst sneak peek of all time, and kapow, God turned her into a bouillon stir stick for the instant soup of God’s chosen people. I had to stop getting carried away. The Bionic Woman wouldn’t go around lifting her skirt, if she had one. She was too busy being husky and beautiful and fighting bad guys. And Bathsheba, she was only being herself—an obedient maiden of God—when her nudity won her the king of Israel. It was completely by accident that he saw her in the bathtub. Great women were chosen to be spied on. The trick was, let your loveliness exude effortlessly, like radon gas, and biblical bridegrooms would somehow fall unconscious out of the sky.

  If I could be like them, minding my own business, saying no to temptation, rejoicing in my modesty, then maybe one lucky day when I least expected it, when my beauty reached its Brooke Shieldsiest breaking point, some handsome man would come along and grab me, hold me down and, you know, da da DA. Then we could get married and never wear clothes again.

  2 | Girl-on-Girl Socks

  “They shall bow down to thee… and the dust of thy feet they lick up…”

  —ISAIAH 49:23

  I loved Ms. Lyons because I believed her name meant she was part jungle cat, like the guy in Manimal. And also, she was the butchiest, most enigmatically sexy-looking, Christianiest dyke I’d ever laid my seven-year-old eyes on.

  Ms. Lyons was our gym teacher at Heritage Christian. She was in her twenties, had a short brown mullet, a wiry, athletic build, and wore anklets that had little red pompoms above the heel. Maybe I loved her because of her socks. Nothing else could really explain my need to get close to her. I was sure to mention to her how much I truly, wholeheartedly loved her socks. Loved them. But the only way to adequately convey it was to accost my mom until she bought me several of my own matching pairs.

  They have to be red,” I explained to her in the apparel section of Caldor, sweating blood from my eyes. “They have to be red. Red like Ms. Lyons’s.”