gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  And that’s when I really cried for my mom. She’d been gone for a year and I had cried, of course, but this was the first time I couldn’t stop myself collapsing. I was sitting on the floor and I pulled my knees in tight, trying to stop from falling. I rocked into myself and Aunt Bev did a thing then, she reached for me, like you’d think she would, but she reached for me with strips of the torn letters in her hands. And she wiped my face with that paper and when the first strips were soaked she threw them in the pile and reached for more. The pages were so old by then, softened from folding and refolding, that Mom’s letters might’ve been a tissue from the pocket of her own robe.

  All those strips of paper and all those tears went into the pot on the stove and the pot boiled all night. The heat from the flame and the metal warmed the room and eventually I stopped falling, tumbling forever. When I landed, I was on my own kitchen floor, so I curled up where I was and slept. I’d wake now and then, the shawl tucked around me, the goats climbing up and through my dreams. Aunt Bev would be sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, watching me. Or she’d be standing, stirring. Sometimes she’d be talking to herself as she did this, whispering, and then she’d adjust the flame, higher, always higher, past where the dial should go, beyond the heat anything man-made could be capable of producing.

  In the morning, she strained the pot into the coffeemaker. She rolled the mush of paper into a ball, squeezed it until it was dry and small enough to fit in a pocket, then she knotted it into the scarf that was back around her neck. She put a filter and coffee grounds into the coffeemaker, setting it to brew. She filled Dad’s favorite cup, the one with First Corinthians 13 in blue letters, and brought him into the kitchen, where he sat and drank the cup through without noticing a thing, without even asking why Aunt Bev was there. Dad’s fingers wrapped around First Corinthians as he lifted it up to ask for another cup and another, and each time he did, Aunt Bev was there with the pot.

  Dad used to break First Corinthians down for me, quick and sure of his mind and his faith, of me. He’d talk about forgiveness like an old gambler sharing tells. Like he’d never lost this game of doing the right thing, never been caught holding a grudge. He’d quote from the Bible, “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” And then, as if from some old Wild West movie, he’d add, “Only the Devil keeps score, my darling girl. Keep it all at zero and you are the one who wins.”

  I pushed around the o’s in a bowl of cereal and watched while Aunt Bev filled Dad’s cup. He had a pretty terrible thirst. And when all the coffee was gone, Dad was, I guess you could say, awake. More than awake. My dad was back that morning. Or, a dad. A version of one. He wasn’t exactly the same. It was the end of something and the beginning of something else. Like most things are.

  DELIVER US

  I started making Mom’s paper flowers again to avoid the life-threatening boredom of Vacation Bible Camp. I’ve been lucky so far. Last year was the first summer I was forced to attend. “It means a great deal to me,” Dad said, in an awkward formal tone not unlike the one used in his council letters. Dad and Aunt Bev had obviously had a conference to determine the path of my life, or my summer, anyway, and they had reached a compromise. If I was going to spend the rest of the year in the arms of temptation, as represented by the Rosary Psychic Encounter Shoppe, then I could spend two precious summer weeks held safely to His bosom at Bible camp.

  To top it off, Aunt Bev, a person who has never taken a vacation before in her entire life, went on vacation. She had a long meeting with my dad, a meeting held privately so I couldn’t burst in, and then suddenly decided to go away. For the same two weeks, it so happens, that the Life Fellowship of Rosary holds Vacation Bible Camp. God might laugh when we make plans but I’m pretty sure even He doesn’t laugh at Aunt Bev.

  * * *

  Vacation Bible Camp isn’t really a camp. It’s basically Life Fellowship, where Dad worships, and Mom used to, opening up for two weeks straight of an otherwise beautiful summer to cram down the throats of Rosary kids any religion that might not have been adequately crammed in during the school year.

  Because if there’s any space left at all, the Devil will fill it.

  Along with a great deal of sermonizing, for some reason the camp also involves contests presumably meant to help us feel like the God of our fathers is hip and cool and fresh. The contests range from seeing who can eat the most jalapeños fished from a bottomless jar filled with tiny hot peppers and a nuclear green fluid that looks awesome coming back up, to who can walk across a room blindfolded without breaking any of the actual raw eggs that are rolled onto the floor amid a mess of Styrofoam peanuts after the blindfolds are in place.

  Because these are totally the things we teens do together when left to our own devices. Good, clean fun. And food wastage. The competitions are interspersed with “lessons.” Lectures on the evils of ingesting too much of the popular culture that has been created to cause our souls to burn. Lectures on the joys of walking in the light of the Lord no matter what we step in.

  It was during one of these lectures last summer that Cy became an official Dickhead.

  * * *

  I was pretending to listen to Pastor Ted go on. And on. But was quietly ripping the Song of Solomon out of the Bible I was holding so I could fold its pages into a bouquet. Bible pages tear quietly and easily and fold perfectly. I’ve made about twenty roses of this chapter now, the only sexy one, and I was just about to slip these pages into my pocket when something flew across the pews, landing right near Pastor Ted. That something was a rubber band from Cy’s braces.

  And it was fantastic. A moment to include in future camp brochures advertising the Treasured Memories to Be Made on the Path to Salvation.

  Pastor Ted stopped speaking. He’d been talking about a show none of us watch at all or would admit to watching anyway because it is for children, and how this show is full of messages from the Devil. There’s a cat on it who is always getting into hijinks and, it turns out, the cat is a servant of the Devil himself, a vehicle to “boost hell’s own ratings.” The whole idea is hysterical, especially the bit about a cat doing anything for anyone other than itself. We all laughed, and the laughing must have loosened a rubber band in the mess of wire in Cy’s mouth.

  I didn’t mean to do it, but I turned with everyone else to look at Cy. At how red his face was. At how he closed his mouth tightly then, his lips disappearing, and how he looked like he wanted to disappear with them. At how Bird laughed so hard he fell between the pews and how Cy finally thought to start laughing too, at himself, and earned his Dickhead status.

  * * *

  In between the lessons and the lame competitions, there was free time after lunch when the Pastor left us alone in the cafeteria. Twenty minutes while he went to the rectory to eat his lunch. And sob.

  Twenty unsupervised minutes.

  When the Devil got busy.

  * * *

  Thanks to Pastor Ted and one of his more remarkably boring lectures on how God is found in “inner space” and the temptations of the world are found in “outer space,” the act of making out in a closet was renamed. What was known as “Seven Minutes in Heaven” to our parents’ generation is now “Going to Outer Space.” Heaven may have been the ultimate destination for the previous generation, but we grew up on space travel.

  Houston, we need a condom.

  CONDOM NATION

  The first time Bird and Dad met it didn’t count as meeting, that day in Principal Harrison’s office. I don’t think Dad even noticed Bird, he was so caught up in the lie I had told. And then he was caught up in Iris Doncaster. Bird’s mom.

  Of. All. People.

  Dad and Iris had apparently already met. At church. I can just see it. Their fingers touching as they pass the collection plate, their smiles shy when the peace is shared. In Principal Harrison’s office, Dad was helpless before Iris Doncaster. It was the way her voice shot across the paperwork, ricocheted like light through a crystal, piercing everyone in the eye, sta
rting headaches like small fires around the room, and helping me understand, at last, why Bird always wants to kill everyone.

  * * *

  The first time Bird and Dad really met was when Dad looked Iris up in the phone book, the actual ink-and-paper phone book full of God’s promises for the good people of Rosary, and under D for Don’t do it, Dad, and Damn it all, there she was, of course. Iris Doncaster of Rosary. And he invited her to dinner at our house. Invited them.

  I have imagined that phone call, how when Iris answered, it was like God’s promise shining through a dark cloud, how when Dad spoke, it was like a tomb creaking open. I’m sure he said something about “making peace.” She said something about “making dinner.” I have imagined how her voice went extra-breathy as she offered to “make us real food from scratch.” Scratch.

  Like fingernails on a blackboard.

  Iris makes chicken suffocated by bread in our kitchen with her hair done up and her lipstick attacking her face. Dad and Bird sit at the kitchen table and Dad forces me to sit there too. He’d been stern, for him. His voice was rasping and slow, but it was even more painful to hear than usual because not only was he trying, he was trying for her. When he’d seen my lack of enthusiasm about the dinner plans he’d made without thinking of me even one little bit, he jumped to a conclusion and told me not to hold a grudge. I knew he would. He understood enough to know that I don’t want Bird to come over but not enough to know this is because of what I do want Bird to do. This faulty assumption on Dad’s part is what he would call a small mercy.

  So, while he was running with that, insisting that I need to forgive Bird for the violence on campus, raising his hands to his head and pointing his fingers like horns, I interpreted for him. “Only the Devil keeps score,” with as much sarcasm as possible before he had a chance to say it himself. “I know, Dad.”

  “And are you the Devil, Helen Dedleder?”

  If there is a God, He is well aware how much I hate this question. It gets old. I mean, really old. Eternally so. Still, here was Dad speaking in full sentences, so I went along.

  “No.”

  “Then pray for zero.”

  Pray for zero basically means to mind my own business. Since Dad doesn’t know about Fast Eddie’s, he doesn’t know that Bird and I are already in each other’s business and it is all I can do not to get in deeper. By inviting the Doncasters over, Dad is mixing up worlds that I want to keep apart. Our kitchen is miles smaller than the tire yard, and here we are all painfully sober. Here, there is no safe distance between truth and dare.

  * * *

  I sit down with them. I move my chair far away from Bird, who is wearing his best wifebeater tank top and has a fresh scar just along his nose on the inside of his left eye, no bruise yet. Whenever Dad isn’t looking at him, Bird looks at me, so I look anywhere else, watch Iris working over at the counter, watch the kitchen grow heavy with smoke and silence, none of us saying a word. Bird doesn’t look at me at the tire yard, much. He’s busy with Mo.

  And without Mo to distract him, his eyes are everywhere I want him to be.

  Finally, Iris asks how school was, zing!, her voice through the room, and I know the Devil has his little scorecard out then because I zing right back, “How was school today, Bird?” I look him right in those eyes, hold myself back from looking past the basic brown to the golden specks, the shiny sparkles that make promises about him.

  He hadn’t been at school today, I had looked for him, as if it were possible to miss him. When I didn’t see Cy either, I thought he could be sick and had reason to hope we’d cancel this stupid dinner after all. Now I am hoping he’ll have to admit he didn’t go, hoping to get him in trouble like a good Christian does. But where I thought Bird might freeze up, struggle with a lie, his eyes don’t squint or narrow, nothing. Instead, they crinkle. He smiles. Just like the Devil, Bird came to play, but before he can spit out his lie, Dad interrupts.

  “Bird?” Dad asks, confused by the nickname. I take a long drink of water from one of the good glasses Dad must have taken down from the top shelf and cleaned and dried himself, and I go back to not looking at anyone.

  “Yeah,” says Bird. He has this slow way of saying “yeah” that turns every room into a bedroom, a bedroom in which things are going just the way he likes it.

  Dad doesn’t seem to notice the bedroom vibe, though. He just waits for Bird to go on.

  “That’s me,” Bird says.

  Iris clatters the frying pan on the stove. “Gas stoves!”

  “Bird?” Dad repeats it as the kitchen goes crisscross with frying-pan noises and I empty my water glass, intent on the climbing vines etched around it that remind me of Mom. Her favorite glasses. Shined up for Iris. I think about the scorecard I am not supposed to be keeping and with my stubby mental golf pencil I make three marks.

  A tie.

  Score one for Bird, one for me. And the Devil makes three.

  “Do you prefer the gas range, Elijah?” Dad’s name is a lullaby on Iris’s lips, though the cradle breaks when she goes on with her nerve, with her utter bitch nerve, to say, “I suppose Evelyn used it more than you do.”

  The kitchen grows so quiet then it seems like even the meat stops sizzling. Like we are an exhibit at a museum, frozen in time, Awkward Rosary Dinners of the Early Twenty-First Century. Iris stares straight ahead, into the hood over the stove, the yellow metal of it, and I can’t tell if she is wishing she could pull those words back in or if she’s done it on purpose, brought up Mom to turn attention from her son.

  Dad finally speaks, but he doesn’t talk about the stove and I love him then for not answering Iris, for the way this tiny act of discourtesy quiets her from hopefully ever speaking Mom’s name again. “And why is it that your nickname is Bird, Spencer?”

  Spencer. What Bird’s mama named him and what no one calls him. She named him after his dad. The dad who left them. And she has to watch now, watch her son wave away this choice, this father, this leaving, and explain the choice he’d made for himself.

  * * *

  I should have to write one thousand times on every chalkboard at Rosary High, I will not fuck Bird Doncaster. I should have to write my own first name and my own last name on all of my notebooks, imagining a future with only myself. I should have to do all the things that girls with crushes do but do them backward in order to undo this, this thing that makes me want to take my clothes off and take Bird’s clothes off and then start working on seeing what’s under each other’s skin.

  * * *

  Bird hates his real name, but he loves to hear this name, the name he gave himself. He will even reintroduce himself to Cy if no one new is around to mess with. Bird and Cy are always re-getting-to-know-each-other this way, by egging each other on, beating each other up. Rain says they should just fuck and get it over with.

  Like fucking someone ever clears things up, I say.

  Like you would know, says Rain.

  But anyway.

  * * *

  In the kitchen of my house with the gas range that my dead mom did or did not prefer and the smoke and quiet forming layers like an archaeological dig, Bird flexes his knuckles. He interlaces his fingers, and with his fingers still entwined, he stretches his arms straight out. At this moment, for those who can’t take their eyes off of them, the muscles in his arms and shoulders ripple like heat on asphalt.

  Then he flicks his hands apart like a switchblade coming open, joins his two middle fingers tip to tip. Right in Dad’s face. No church or steeple, no congregants here, and in place of a sermon, just Bird, almost whispering, “Because fuck you, that’s why.”

  * * *

  I should have to carve my own name into all the cafeteria tables using only a plastic fork, until the fork breaks and my fingers bleed. Helen Dedleder Forever.

  * * *

  Iris drops a pan or a lid, something loud, onto the stove. “Spencer!” There is no miracle in her voice this time, she says his name as if she really has never heard or seen
him do this before.

  But of course she has.

  And when neither one of them, Dad or Bird, turns to look at her, take their eyes off of each other, she laughs. It is like her laugh makes the record skip, one of those long-playing LPs, all dusty in the corner of our living room, and the Doncaster Family Singers are back in their groove.

  “That is not appropriate dinner talk,” Iris says.

  And then Bird starts to laugh, really laugh, and Dad, who seems paralyzed except for the way his eyes hold Bird’s as if he can’t tell if he should punch him or pray for him, says, “Your mother is right.” And then he says this next thing, a word I have never heard him say, and I feel somewhere there must be a fallen angel licking his pencil tip, writing a little mark on a scorecard. “Son,” my dad says. “We won’t have that kind of talk.”

  I actually make a noise here. It feels like a scream but no one hears.

  “The fan! There it is!” Iris sings out. The fan doesn’t do shit, the smoke lingers around us heavy as the word that just came out of Dad’s mouth. But the kitchen fills with whirring and this is somehow better.

  “Yes, indeed, dinnertime. Almost dinnertime! Who’s hungry?”

  Iris notes Dad’s unwillingness to withhold forgiveness, trusts in it, because she starts bringing her spawn over for dinner every single week, sometimes twice. After the sixth or seventh dinner, after as many weeks of imagining ways to poison the shepherd’s pie, I start to think about how long it has been since our house had any life in it. Since I’d last seen Rudolph, how long it had been since my furry baby cat had curled onto my bed at night, had spilled my homework onto the floor, had purred along to my prayers as he fell asleep. And I start to think about how, whether the Devil’s keeping score or not, I’m the one always losing.