In the morning, after cleanup duty and chores, there was a series of inspections: military-style cabin inspection, grounds inspection, modest shorts inspection (no more than three fingers above the knee), and inspection for potentially midriff-exposing shirts (reach for the sky, young lady). Then, as a cooldown to the frenzy of repression, we had Bible time, where you found a quiet spot outside to sit and pretend to read God’s word.
The picture on the inside of my Bible cover was the happy, laughing Jesus, surrounded by a flock of more lambs. These were still alive. Later they would all be gory carnage, and Jesus would too, but for now they were frolicking in a meadow and having a tragically good time. Maybe they were already dead and in heaven.
Pastor Heath was on the camp staff that year. He was one of the Bible teachers, or maybe the Shorts Master Chief. He was young and looked sort of like John Ritter circa Three’s Company, which was an unfortunate strike against any aspiring man of God. He did try, in the way that all biblical men do, to be hip.
During morning chapel he’d begin by pinching his eyes shut and praying aloud for the swift and painless death to our independent thought.
“Amen,” he’d say, then pause to soak up all the heavenly power. “Now tell me something, you guys. Dirty Dancing—really popular movie, right? I want to begin this morning by talking a little bit about that. I was meditating on Scripture last night, when the Lord impressed upon me to remind you that when you girls move your bodies in suggestive ways, do you know how disgusting that is to God? That’s why He calls it dirty. Maybe you can’t see it or smell it, but you know who can? God can. It smells like dog doo to Him. Imagine showing up at heaven’s gates smelling like dog doo!”
Then the boys would laugh at us, and we’d sing and do chores, and the handbell would ring, and we’d repeat the whole thing again. Everyone would sit back down on the outdoor benches, girls on the left, boys on the right. You know, as above, so below. I’d make little designs in the dirt with the toe of my sneaker, and Pastor Heath would pace back and forth with his Bible.
“Boys and girls, we talked this morning about what it means to be dirty, but what does it mean to be clean? I know all you young ladies love to be clean. You sure do take a lot of showers. I walk by your cabins in the morning, and boy I hear that water running overtime. Think about how much time you spend cleaning your bodies, making your body smell nice. But why? That doesn’t matter to God. What He cares about is, have you cleaned up your thoughts today?”
My body smells nice, I kept thinking. My body smells nice, my body, my smell. I kept picturing naked girls with wet breasts and dark, coiling pubic hair.
Dear God, I prayed, trying to cancel it out with Jesus’s face. Jesus was skinny but well proportioned, with middle-parted hippie hair, and he loved to wear a blue afghan over his shoulder.
Please forgive me for thinking that. Amen.
That’s all you had to do. It wasn’t complicated. Whether the sin was a triple homicide or some suggestive dancing, it was all the same to God so long as you regularly re-reserved your spot in the afterlife by reporting on yourself, and re-repenting.
“Boys and girls,” Pastor Heath rambled on, “what is hell like? That’s a great question. Well, our wonderful Savior has devised a great plan: to come back at any second and send you straight to hell. And hell is the dirtiest, most filthy place you could ever imagine. A place filled with garbage and dead bodies. Hell is like a garbage dump. A dump that lasts forever.
“So boys and girls, look to your left and look to your right. If your friends dropped dead today, would they go to heaven or to hell? Are they tempted by rock music? Do they tempt others with immodest dress? Do they show contempt for authority?”
A hush went over as the sin-cataloging began.
“Have they been baptized? Revelation 20:10 says those in hell shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. If you don’t want that to happen to them, then you’ve got to bring all your friends to Jesus.”
The breeze touched the cold sweat on the back of my neck.
Pastor Heath smiled. “Now raise your hand if you’re on God’s team!”
Usually, it was hard to get amped about an eternity spent caroling the streets of gold, singing pandering hymns like “Our God Is an Awesome God.” Our God was actually an incredibly insecure God, His praise meter always ticking on empty, always needy for worship, a Scooby-Snack to keep His good graces flowing. But compared to having an eternally maggot-infested sunburn, never-ending Sunday school looked pretty good.
“Boys and girls, raise your hand if you are on God’s team. Let the Lord hear you!”
“GOD’S TEAM!” we screamed, as if pursued.
During quiet Bible time, Pastor Heath spent a lot of time wandering around with his leather-bound Bible tucked under his tanned arm. He was trolling for an unlucky kid. Would you like to read together? It was kind of funny, that poor sucker who had to read the Bible with him, ha-ha. Until I looked up one morning and saw the bottoms of his knee-length camp shorts, waiting.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Oh. Corinthians,” I lied.
“One of my favorites. Would you like to read Corinthians together?”
No, I thought but accepted heartily. One must always love to read the Bible with older men, just like in Bible times, when smiling children gathered to lick Jesus’s sandals like hordes of hungry kittens.
We meandered to the cement stoop by the girls’ cabin, and I sat hip to hip against his hairy arm, sharing a Bible, listening to the whistle of his nostril hairs in my ear.
After what seemed like the longest hour of my life, the fifteen-minute quiet-reading cowbell sounded, he stood up and asked if I would come to his cabin and read the Bible together tomorrow. It wasn’t a choice, since this is the kind of thing Jesus would probably ask you to do if He was at Bible camp.
The next morning he was waiting for me, and I followed him with heavy feet, away down the dusty path, away from the other campers, past the mess hall, beyond the camp limits, good-bye world, up a lane where you could actually see the river, where cottages for paying vacationers were lined along the overlook. You could hear people being normal, cooking breakfast and watching TV in their little kitchens. It was hot and bright outside, and I climbed up a fleet of blinding white porch steps, feeling icky about this alone time requested by a man of God.
“Would you like a present?” he asked when we were inside.
He handed me a little plastic Bible on a string and promised another for getting through Second Corinthians by the end of the week. He sat down on an upright recliner, Bible opened in his right hand.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering where to sit.
“Right here,” he said, patting his lap.
It was a horrible thing. His lap, no. Couldn’t be. But I strode toward him, like of course! I’ll just make myself at home on your thighs, praise Jesus.
Contact with the edge of his hairy knees was mentally painful, so I thought of it like the kitchen counter maybe, a piece of furniture God Himself had designed for fellowship.
“Scoot back, stranger.” He smiled, and I kind of laughed, like oh yeah, sorry. That’s cool. We read Corinthians out of his right hand, love is this, love is that, love is his hairy left arm at ease on the armrest, his wedding band shiny like my dad’s but his fingers younger, browner, more alarming.
He’s just being nice! I thought. Gross! I tried to think about him as one might think about one’s dad, y’know, all fatherly and neutral and Pa-ish. That failed epically, so I mentally retreated to my happy Bible reading place, where the sunlight was dancing and the birds were trilling in the branches, the Old Testament was revealing its friendly R-rated secrets, and there was none of this disturbing crap about love. I narrowed my tunnel vision to the teensy font of his well-highlighted Bible.
I was surviving, three words at a time, when the glorious bell dinged in the distance. I hopped up, salivating for craft time. “Please! I can’t be late, I’ve got to paint
Jesus’s head!”
“Jesus loves you very much,” he told me with a wink. “Do you want to pray?”
Christians could never just end the goddamn thing, whatever it was. There always had to be another ten minutes of prayer tagged onto the second ending of anything. Wringing the listeners of their last drop of hope scored brownie points with the Almighty. Pastor Heath gathered my hands in his and bowed his head.
“Dear Lord. I ask that you help this child grow to be more like you every day, blossoming into a woman of God, knowing you in every way, oh Lord.”
I stared at my dirty sneakers trapped between his clean boat shoes and told myself, of course he didn’t really, secretly want me and Janet to be his roommates, living downstairs from Mr. Roper. Of course not. The little plastic Bible dug into my palm, slippery with sweat.
“Thank you for this special time of communion, for your special love. Thank you for this beautiful day.”
His eyes were shut into little pinches again, searching for more things to thank God for.
“Amen.” His eyes opened. “Again tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said, helping myself to the screen door exit. “Tomorrow.”
I blinked in the sunlight, down the steps. Now all I needed was a quarter and a pay phone and a few thugs from Moses’s army. Although I knew the angel Gabriel was never freaking going to appear in a dream and help me. I was on call if he did, but in the meantime, for actual real-life help I’d have to phone the earthly hotline of Mom and Dad.
“Hello? Mom?” It was evening, raining hard outside the lone phone booth, which was for emergency use only. Kids didn’t normally get to call home from camp, but I’d told my counselor that I was considering being baptized. Excited, she had hugged me and given me all the quarters she had in her portable hope chest.
“Hi!” Dad’s voice on the other end of the line was cheery and strong and normal enough to keep the twelve disciples at arm’s length. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh! Yeah, great. I think I’m gonna get baptized. And, um, oh yeah. I don’t want to read the Bible in Pastor’s cabin anymore. It makes me feel weird. Can I just read it alone? Can you call and ask someone if it would be okay?”
Dad: “Do what now?”
God’s tender love, I tried to explain, was getting too tender. Yes, I wanted to read Deuteronomy, yes, I wanted to learn all about what God did with the idol worshippers, you know, how He chopped up and basted them in a pomegranate reduction of wrath. I wanted to read all of that, but I just wanted to read about it all alone.
Lucky for me, Dad was my pinch hitter. He’d survived Scottish boarding school, which I imagined was an iceencrusted prison of stone, where little boys were punished for smiling and made to run barefoot in the snow at dawn. When you’ve spent your childhood eating blood pudding and getting beaten under your kilt by perverted black-robed vicars, youth pastors who look like lovable bachelors are child’s play.
“We’ll take care of it,” he said. Dad meant it. Sure, God was great, but in order to get anything done He usually required forty thousand prayers and a heavenly host of hot angels singing three-part harmony. But Dad was a businessman. He just needed a telephone.
6 | Our God-Given Talents
“… seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a-whoring.”
—NUMBERS 15:39
There was a girl at my school who was a perfect pianist. She could master concertos in mere minutes. No song was too difficult. Whenever the choir director needed an accompanist for yet another show tune medley, she was his go-to gal. As long as she had someone next to her on the bench turning the pages, she never made a single mistake. Yet when the audience clapped at the end, she just sat there, hunched and solemn and miserable looking. I never understood how someone so talented wasn’t more pleased with herself.
In our family, musical talent, like beauty, was a sex-linked allele and big bro scored the mother lode. Hot and popular and barely seventeen, Kyle was also a virtuoso on the piano who could jam like Billy Joel. He didn’t even need sheet music. He didn’t even need lessons. He could feel the songs in his hands. From up in my room, I’d hear him settle at the bench downstairs, first a few scales, and then slowly building, until he’d turn loose on the keys and fill the house with music I would later identify as funk. It was a welcome reprieve from Neil Diamond’s second volume of Greatest Hits, or the Bill Gaither Trio, which tended to get a lot of playtime on the downstairs stereo.
“Why’d you stop?” Mom called out from some corner of the house, whenever Kyle paused for too long. “I was enjoying that!”
Never one to pander for attention, Kyle responded by battering out a round of “Chopsticks.” Just for her.
“Booo,” Mom called back.
Everybody loved to hear him play. That is, except when he had to read notes. On a piece of sheet music. Then, he became human. Instead of flow and cohesion, there would be halting chords, growling and finally echoing thunder as he’d stomp the pedals.
“WHY?” he shouted at the empty room. “WHY (thud) CAN’T (thud) I READ (thud-thud)?”
I knew why. He was not an accompanist. He was better. He had soul.
I, on the other hand, had the Barbie version of American Bandstand to film.
“Hey, pretty lady, wanna dance?” asked dark-haired Ken. I zoomed in with our mammoth-size video camera for a closeup of Skipper’s teensy midriff top and hard plastic smile.
“You’re kinda hot, Ken,” she said. “Okay.”
I paused the recording and turned her head to face his.
The dance floor was a plank of Styrofoam suspended between two chairs, so when I poked their feet through, behold, they stood like real people. As I swayed their feet from underneath, they danced together with the subtle grace of human windshield wipers.
The major problem with the choreography was that Barbie’s wisp of a torso could not withstand the g-force. As the camera rolled, she fell into a severe back handspring, leaving Ken with only the stump of her pelvis. He seemed not to notice, his unbending arms zombielike around his missing partner.
“Gee, Barbie, you’re wicked flexible.”
Then, like a wrecking ball into the gentle ambience of Lionel Richie, came Mom’s death knell: “Have you PRACTICED!?”
I pressed Stop.
“Everybody take five.”
I closed the door on my kick-ass dance club, complete with its make-out loft and Rose Petal Barbie as its half-naked bartender, and dragged myself downstairs to a spare bedroom deemed the “music room.” I clicked on the overhead light, which cast a depressingly yellow glow on the carpet. I pulled my antique violin from its velvet-lined case and looked around. Music books everywhere, all stamped with the maddening gibberish of accomplished composers.
Mom had started us on the violin right after we could talk because she heard that Suzuki could stimulate neurological development. But by fifth grade it was clear that Suzuki had not helped me. At all. In fact, my futile donkey braying drove him to loathe me from beyond the grave. But Mom insisted on continuing with the lessons. Our rigorous musical training helped her make peace with her own austere upbringing, where any and all instruments, along with any and all uncovered female legs, and sometimes even breathing, were suspected of highly offending God.
So every day I entered the stringed penitentiary like an inmate and dropped the soap for Vivaldi. I had to use a timer for my suffering, because if I emerged from practicing too soon, my footfalls on the carpet past Mom’s room would pop a trip wire in her brain. I’d be almost to the kitchen and—
“I don’t know why I’m paying your teachers hundreds of dollars WHEN YOU WON’T EVEN PRACTICE.”
“I did practice!” came my predictably shocked response. “What are you talking about? I just did!”
“That was not practicing. That was my money going out the window.”
She was right. But sometimes I tried to put up a fight.
“That was fifteen minutes!” I
said, rounding up by ten. “Fif! Teen! Minutes!”
Then Dad would walk in from his three-week business trip to war-torn Angola, tired and pissed off and looking for spoiled American children to straighten out.
“Practice the bloody instrument or be done with it,” he hollered to whoever was within earshot, spit flying from his lips. “Quit the bloody styou-pid lessons already.”
It would’ve been a blessing to all, really. A respectful tribute to Father Suzuki, who rolled over in his grave on permanent press every time I minueted in G. But to Mom, it was candy-assed laziness.
“I agree, let her quit,” she said, nodding and shaking her head at the same time, unable to swallow this lump of common sense. She snapped on yellow rubber gloves and began pawing her rag at some dried food on the kitchen counter. She had not suffered through my Sonata for Mating Cats all these years for nothing. Quitting? No. Her daughter would play fourth violin in the Especially Nongifted Chamber Ensemble For Rejects, so help me.
You knew you were under a severe alert when it got to so help me. It was the last stop on the train to whup-ass.
“I don’t want to quit?” I offered.
“Fine. Practice,” Dad said. “That, or so help me, I’m gonna lambaste your backside.”
I never knew exactly what a lambaste was, but whenever Dad brought it up I imagined something like a red-hot two-by-four, or perhaps a turkey baster filled with lava, something his child-loathing Victorian British ancestors would’ve advised. I did not ponder long but hightailed it to the music room, to make hay and let the family suffer through the concerto of my defeat.
I’d done this routine for so long I’d earned default bragging rights.
“I’ve played violin for seven years,” I’d say to friends. They’d suck in their breath.
“Seven years? You must be good!”
The problem was, I completely, totally, and unequivocally sucked. Not just a little bit. But boatloads of pure, unmitigated suck. Seven years, and I still couldn’t make any vibrato. I’d tried for years to make my wrist rapidly undulate around the neck of the violin like it was supposed to, like every other girl in the freakin’ orchestra could. But I lacked a tendon, or a synapse, or maybe the interest. My end notes always trailed off flat as pancakes, only sharp. Friends would nod and tell me how good I was, their eyes twitching. Judges at Regional crossed themselves as I sawed my way through Bach. I was the great unifier for the line of nervous auditioners. “Holy shit,” they whispered, “we must be good.”
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 8