Riverine

by Angela Palm

  I hid my own soul deep down in my spine to keep it from the Devil. If Corey didn’t want it, Satan couldn’t have it. I folded my hands in prayer. I was passed over, blood safe. Saved. I would go to a chocolate heaven. I waited for a vague notion of death that would take me there and fell asleep obsessing about my own funeral. Who would come? What would they wear? Would anyone cry? Would Corey?

  Covenants, 13

  Our Papa Lou had died, and no one was saying much about it. He was there for Christmas, and then he went to Florida with his cancer and didn’t come back. We thought they knew this was coming, but nobody would say. And anyway, we had another grandpa whom we liked almost as much and had known longer than this one.

  “Don’t be sad, girls,” our mothers said to Mandi and me. “He’s watching you all the time.”

  “Like Danny Boy?” I asked. We’d gotten Danny Boy after Fido died of cancer. We could not keep dogs alive. Danny Boy had been hit by a car. My mother said it was an old Ford pickup that hit him, a white one like the neighbor drove from home to work to the bar and home again each day.

  “Exactly like that.”

  I likened dead Papa Lou to Jesus and Santa, to Danny Boy and Fido. This bothered me because I preferred to pee alone, and now there were two invisible persons, one invisible God, and two dead dogs following me into the bathroom. It was getting crowded. I said to dead Papa Lou, as I’d said to the others, “Close your eyes when I have to go.” But how did I know he was listening?

  Our mothers took us to the beach at Lake Michigan to cheer us up, although we were not very much in need of cheering. We felt cheated because we did not get to see the body. He went to ash, and into a jar. Then he went all across the Florida Keys, where he’d lived out the last of his cancer with my grandma.

  “Our girls,” my mom said in her patented sad voice. She would have made an excellent professional mourner in another culture, another time; the roiling emotions to which she could not put words she easily refracted through the pain of others. Mandi and I wore the matching bathing suits they bought us, yellow one-pieces with pink flowers that rode up our backsides. Mandi preferred dragon-flies to flowers and I wanted a blue two-piece, but we had no choice. Through us, they would recreate the childhood they were robbed of by their own parents’ failures, even as we suffocated in it. We would be made in their likeness if it killed us all.

  “It’s like looking at ourselves,” said Mandi’s mom, my aunt Eileen.

  The sisters cried twin sets of tears, and we rolled our eyes.

  “Get a therapist,” we joked under our breath.

  My mother had brought a little paperback book by Danielle Steel and Aunt Eileen had brought a gigantic Bible, but they didn’t read. Books were decoration with these women. Instead, they watched us from behind their oversized sunglasses.

  We looked absurd in our children’s swimsuits, but it was better than being at home, where there was nothing to do but watch the corn grow and poke the cats that slept in the windowsills. We began the rituals: arranging towels, removing sandals, nailing down our lightweight things with heavy things. That was where our routines diverged. Mandi ran headfirst into the water, without flinching when she reached the rocky parts that bit the balls of your feet. She dove in, eyes open, hair tangled against her face and neck. I lingered in the sand, hoping the water was not too cold, and tied my hair back into a safe ponytail. I inched my way in carefully. Toes, then ankles, then calves. I did not trust water to stay put.

  Our mothers decided from behind their sunglasses that we would have a Girls’ Night. My father was going out again and Mandi’s parents were divorced. Our fathers had met in basic training fifteen years earlier and had never gotten too far out of one another’s sight until now. Marrying sisters seemed to be insurance against their separating. But with the divorce, loyalties had split.

  Later, when we were done with painted fingernails and mud masks, Mandi and I said we were tired and filched the Ouija board game from under my mattress. We locked my door. Our mothers watched black-and-white films upstairs, ruminating over the bright spots of their collective past, that handful of Stardust they so cherished. Reliving the few happy memories they shared. They took turns crying over Jimmy Stewart because he looked like Grandpa McCann, whom we never met and whom they barely knew. There had been so many fathers that his true fatherness got watered down. He was reduced to three qualities: abusive drunk, Greyhound bus driver, dead in a bathtub from a heart attack at forty-one. Every story we heard about him could be categorized as one of the three. Is that all a life came down to? I wondered. I thought of Papa Lou. Funny, gentler than anyone else in our family, kept a small farm full of animals that we loved to tend. I had already reduced his life to that. I wondered if someday I would be like my mother and aunt: remembering my past in a dozen stories, six good, six bad, told and retold at Thanksgiving dinners. A glossed-over life. The day-to-day of it foggy.

  Mandi and I stayed up that night cavorting with spirits. We were confounded by Milton Bradley’s genius. They had either packed souls into the flimsy board or aroused a desire in our minds strong enough to make us subconsciously move the pointer with our energized fingers. We didn’t care which was true. We asked to talk to Kurt Cobain, who had recently committed suicide. We asked for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It never occurred to us to talk to Papa Lou or Grandpa McCann.

  But the rock stars were busy.

  “Who am I going to marry?” I asked next.

  The board pointed to C, then to E.

  I knew one person with those initials: Corey. But I said, “Ew. Clint Eastwood? He’s old.”

  “I’m never getting married,” Mandi said.

  “Fine, I still am.”

  Perfection of Grace, 14

  By age thirteen, I had been to a dozen different churches or more. At one point, our town was featured in The Guinness Book of World Records for having the most churches per capita; there were plenty available options. New ones seemed to open every week, and I attended many of them with friends, via a bus or van that would pick me up from my house, or with another relative. I had been to the First Dutch Reform Church and the Second Dutch Reform Church. I had been to Grace Fellowship, which met in the gymnasium of my elementary school. I had been to the Virgie Christian Church, a tiny white chapel with narrow wooden pews. I went to the Nazareth Presbyterian Church for vacation Bible school, where I memorized the Lord’s Prayer. Everywhere, families entered, gathered, prayed, and exited together. I wondered what it was like, to be together and smiling with your family. To be dressed nicely together, to have had a breakfast of eggs and grits, share jovial chatter and then go to a movie. To have that be regular and not a once-a-year event.

  One Sunday I went with Mandi to the Church of the Nazarene. Her mother—a true believer—had been church hopping as I had been, and this one wasn’t as far away. I did not know what Nazarene meant, but I imagined cloaked monks and secret, cobbled paths, knife rituals and possibly some sex. I was mistaken.

  The Church of the Nazarene was made of wood, painted a deep brick red that flaked and chipped away in a strong wind. A large ramp wrapped around a small staircase that led to the unadorned door. I took the long way up. This church had very few windows, and inside it smelled permanently of sugar cookies, the weeks and weeks of postsermon refreshments having permeated the makeshift walls and thin carpets that lined the building’s interior. I was uncomfortable because we were late. The girls’ worship class had already started, and I didn’t want them to stare at me. I was Sarah, plain and tall, a newcomer in an established community. The girls would be mean. They would think my dress was ugly. My mother made me wear it, and she dressed me like a spinster, ensuring as much of my neck and chest and arms was covered as was possible. Since the age of eleven, I had begun to feel the attention of boys and men upon me, their gazes warm and penetrating as the sun. Even in churches.

  “This is my cousin, Angela,” Mandi said to the group. We stood there, an alarming spectrum of traits
spread across our faces in one matrilineal stroke: toothy, trusting smiles paired with suspicious eyes. We waited for the question.

  “Cousins? You look like sisters.”

  We shrugged. We never had a good answer for this.

  The class’s leader invited us into their circle. We sat. A Bible was passed around the circle, lap to lap. We took turns reading lines from the book of Matthew.

  When it was my turn, I read, “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” I passed the book to the blond girl on my right. I wanted to be as blond as the women in my father’s magazines, and I didn’t like her because she was blond by nature and because she looked at my dress disapprovingly. I wanted to say my mother made me wear this, but I kept quiet. I wanted to say this streak of gold in my hair is for real, but the truth was I squeezed lemon juice onto it and sat in full sunlight so it would lighten even though it sometimes got so hot that I nearly passed out.

  I felt an urge to walk out of the room when they started singing. I almost acted on it, and then I looked to Mandi for her approval. She was not singing. She only moved her lips to the words, so I moved my lips, too.

  Omniscience, 14

  Besides Mandi, I had a best friend, Valerie. We bought necklaces that announced our friendship in two halves of a heart that when pressed together fit like a zipper down the center. After a few weeks at the Church of the Nazarene, I went with her family to Saint Cecilia’s on Sunday mornings. This church had very high ceilings, which I think was on purpose—meant to make the patrons feel small and unworthy of a god so large and a religion so hierarchical.

  I never stayed at one church for long. Some I attended only once. Others I attended for weeks or months. I was a religion junkie, arbitrarily adopting any beliefs I encountered—Baptist, Presbyterian, Dutch Reform, Methodist. But in rural Indiana, they were all variations on the same concept—patriarchal, restrictive, and full of people who looked and acted more or less the same. I remained outside their communities, even as I attempted, albeit halfheartedly, to integrate into them. I’d been told my grandmother became a Buddhist, temporarily, while she was living on the South Side of Chicago, and this knowledge pulled at me, a kind of tether between us. Mostly, I went to churches with other people’s families while my family stayed at home. Intermittently my mother would redouble her efforts to instill in us “Christian values” by going to church with me and my brother. The slogan she adopted and would use for years to come was a ubiquitous salvation whose principles of honesty, abstinence, and obedience reflected the core of my parents’ parenting style. As a consequence of those principles, I was forced to lie to get through life as a mildly sinful human. I feared punishment, and operated largely in an effort to avoid it. I learned much later that negative punishment of children—both corporal and noncorporal—was detrimental to their psychological development. I had been subjected to both. Spending weekends at Valerie’s house afforded me more freedom than I’d ever known. When we walked outside the house into the backyard to swim, we didn’t have to ask permission. When we rode her brother’s moped around the subdivision, no one raised an eyebrow. When we had male friends come over to watch a movie with us, it was no big deal. I was relieved to be normal, neutral, innocent until proven guilty. “We would be so ashamed if you got into trouble,” my mother would say. I never heard her say the word pregnant, but that’s what she meant—their ultimate fear. It didn’t matter what the circumstances were—going to the Pizza Hut with kids from school, going to Friday-night football games. When I did go, one or both of my parents went, too, and my father watched me closely, sometimes making accusations that were not true, insisting he saw me kissing some boy or another. But I could go to church and I could go to Valerie’s house, no questions asked. No tagalong, suspicious parent.

  While I visited churches, Corey visited boys’ homes and juvenile detention centers. His behavior had started to change. He was becoming a troublemaker—getting kicked out of school, being arrested for petty delinquency, running away from home. But he was no different from me. One night I told him over our walkie-talkies that a girl at school was hitting me and harassing me at lunch for no reason. He asked who it was, and I told him. He said he’d take care of it. She never bothered me again. Still, he came over to see us less. Often his window stayed dark at night. I didn’t know where he was, how to reach him, or when he’d be back. But then as suddenly as he’d left, he’d show up one day, smiling and dribbling a basketball, and everything would be back to normal.

  My father would not attend church. “I believe in God,” he once told me, “but I’ll never go to church.” The thought of my father praying to any god, even privately, was unfathomable.

  “Can’t you do it for Mom?” If it would make her feel loved, somehow make our family seem more united, then I wished it for her.

  “No,” he said. End of discussion.

  I prayed the same prayers to the same mysterious god at these churches, ignoring the rules of their various belief systems. The differences between them were unclear to me. Showing up to pray, to feel something, was the extent of my commitment. I was there because I wanted something back, not because it was right or good. I prayed for a mother who could find more worth in herself than my father would lead her to believe she possessed. Once, I thought a prayer had come true. My mother emerged from her bedroom dressed for an office holiday party wearing a black dress. She had swept her hair up into a neat bun, put on makeup, and traded her glasses for contacts. She glowed. She was making an entrance, and I rooted for her silently as if she were in the running for homecoming queen. She presented herself to my father, smiling. He told her she looked like a fat geisha, and sent my mother spinning back into herself. Down and out. Another time, when she enrolled in night classes at the nearest Purdue extension campus, I thought it had happened. “I won’t have a wife that makes more money than me,” he said. Between his discouraging her and her being unable to comprehend algebra, she stopped. At all of the churches, I prayed for a father who was not so harsh, a father who replied, “Yes, dear?” when I said, “Dad, Dad. Dad, I have something to say,” instead of staring at the television or banging away with a hammer until I simply gave up and went away. I prayed for a brother who was not pressed flat by my father’s big thumbs, who was not knocked upside the head and brought to tears for every tiny infraction of my parents’ impossible standards. I prayed for a home where yelling wasn’t the main means of communication. I prayed for my parents to divorce—an end to a constant state of what felt to me like disorder and tension. I prayed for Corey to stay home, to look straight at me, count my freckles, touch an index finger to the chicken pox scar above my right eyebrow, and say, “What’s this from?” I prayed for him to keep looking. I did not pray for myself specifically because I didn’t have words for what it was I needed or wanted. In my mind I was already gone from our home, and I had taken Corey and Marcus with me to the future.

  There was less music in the Catholic church than in others I’d visited. What I liked most about Catholicism was the forced kindness between the parish’s members, an instant community of positivity. “Peace be with you,” I said with a shy smile to the middle-aged woman in front of me at my friend’s church. Her hands were thin and frail, and I didn’t want to let go. I wanted her to know that I meant it. I wanted her to see that I was earnest. I tried to look empathetic, tried to absorb some of her problems, whatever they might be. But Catholics didn’t want to win you over the way that Baptists did, or even the way that Methodists did. They didn’t want you nearly as badly. No one recruited visitors to join the Catholic faith. Their faith required far more than a spirit of volunteerism. The woman shrank away from me and turned to spread the peace elsewhere.

  The ritual responses became familiar quickly, rolling off my tongue like cotton clouds puffed into the air. I uttered them as though I’d been saying them for years, and this was a comfort even though I knew it was a lie. Which brings me to the topic of confession. In Catholicism, n
on-Catholics are prohibited from partaking in many of the faith’s perks, including confession. This turned out to be a real disappointment, even more so than being prohibited from taking communion, when you have to sit in the pew while the rest of the faithful in your row sashay by you to line up for the Eucharist. Stark exclusion from this particular religious perk felt like the equivalent of a dunce cap. “Dunskey,” my father called us at home. He had endless ways of noting our stupidity. I said it over and over to myself while I waited for the rest of my aisle to return. Dunskey, dunskey. Almost rhymed with drunksky, skunksky.

  My Catholic friend and I had been writing poetry. We filled the widely lined pages of black-and-white composition tablets. We revised and rewrote, drawing flowers and clouds around the final drafts with crayons. These poems were mostly abstract constructions of our overwhelming feelings. Often, we brought ourselves to laughter and tears within the space of a minute. We wrote about grievances against the authorities of school and home. We wrote about grievances of the heart. This boy did not call, this boy liked another girl. This one said he would see us at the basketball game, but where was he? Woe was us. The poems were totems of our coming of age, a record of our existence. We were here, we wrote in black ink. We wanted badly to matter, but there was nothing artful about our words.