Chat was a counseling-center word, a word that, when somebody said it like Crawford just had, never really meant chat at all. It meant a big conversation about the kinds of things you would never just chat with someone about, never.
“What’d I do now?” I asked, shrugging out from under his heavy hand and crossing my arms over my chest, leaning against the doorframe in a way that I hoped suggested that I couldn’t care less, whatever. But I was running over sins in my mind as fast as I could call them up. Was it the missing beer from the fridge? Was it Holy Rosary? Was it an intercepted package from Lindsey? Was it pot with Jamie? Check here for all of the above.
The four of us traded glances. I could see Crawford making the face he made when he was searching for power-ful words during a sermon, but before he could get them out, Ruth made a freaky, strangled sobbing noise from the couch and muffled it fast with her hand. Ray got up to go to her, and when he did, a pamphlet slid off his lap and onto the floor. It was just one thin trifold, nothing I’d have noticed from across the room, but I sure did once it lay against the rug, its logo unmistakable: God’s Promise—those pamphlets that cool Reverend Rick had stacked at the end of the snacks table. The pamphlet that Coley had taken, put in her purse.
After feeling for so long like I could get away with anything, anything—like I could just keep sliding free in the nick of time like Indiana Jones rolling out from under the impossibly fast slam of a metal gate, narrowly escaping a series of steel spikes, a gigantic rolling ball of stone in a closed-in tunnel, near misses, just close enough to give you a jolt—I felt the choke of being caught, and knowing it, and the kind of shame that sidecars that choke.
“I know you can see how difficult this is for all of us,” Pastor Crawford said. “And we know that this is going to be very difficult for you as well.” He reached out like he was gonna do the hand on my shoulder again, but then recon-sidered and instead motioned me toward the club chair.
I went, thinking in those few moments that this all must have something to do with Lindsey, her packages and letters, maybe even those locker-room photos we’d taken, all of it evidence against me. I can’t quite explain why I focused on Lindsey and only Lindsey, but that’s what happened: I was convinced, sitting in that club chair, pulling my knees up into my chest, looking at no one, that this chat absolutely had to do with all that mail between us.
And so I was already working on the ways that I’d blame all this on Lindsey, her influence, her wicked, big-city abominations, when Crawford said, “Coley Taylor and her mother came to my house last night,” and his words crashed through me like someone smashing cymbals together over my head. Ruth leaned into Ray, letting his blue-work-shirted chest do a better job than her hand of muffling her even bigger sobs.
From there on I had a hard time following Crawford’s narrative. I tuned in and out, in and out, like a fucked-up set of earphones with a wire loose. I heard all of his words, I mean, I was right there and he was talking to me, but it was like he was telling some complicated, embarrassing story about somebody else. He told me about how Ty and the drunken cowboys had wrangled a story, “the truth,” out of Coley after I had left her apartment two nights before, and in that story, “the truth,” I was the pursuer and Coley the innocent friend, and a very angry Ty had convinced her to go to Mrs. Taylor the following morning, and Coley had then told her mother about Lindsey’s corruption of me and my attempted corruption of her, my sick infatuation, and how she felt sorry for me, and how I needed help: God’s help. Then Pastor Crawford told me about how he had had to deal with this news, how he had visited Ruth that morning, before she got in the Fetus Mobile for her sales trip to Broadus, me at Scanlan teaching my Level Threes the elementary backstroke—chicken, airplane, soldier, repeat, repeat—he and Ruth on the couch staring down the details of my ugly, sinful behavior. Once Ruth could pull herself together enough to stand, and that took hours, the two of them had searched my room, and there it all was: the mail I had wrongly thought of as the cause, not the cause at all but instead the corroborating proof to Coley’s accusations, the letters and the videos and the note from Jamie, the photos, the mix tapes, the fucking stack of movie tickets I’d rubber-banded together and had been saving for the dollhouse, the dollhouse itself. But who could make any sense of that?
Pastor Crawford kept on in his steady, practiced, too-calm voice, talking about how it wasn’t at all too late for me, about Christ’s ability to cure these impure thoughts and actions, to rid me of these sinful impulses, to heal me, to make me whole, while I thought, over and over: Coley told, Coley told, Coley told. And then: They know, they know, they know. Just those two thoughts on repeat, steady like a drum rhythm. And it actually wasn’t so much anger that I felt right then. Nor was it betrayal, even. Instead I felt tired, and I felt caught, and weak; and I somehow felt ready for my punishment, whatever it might be, just bring it on.
Pastor Crawford paused several times during his living-room sermon, for me to add something, or to question, I guess, but I didn’t.
At some point he said, “I think we can agree that Miles City isn’t the best place for you right now, spiritually or otherwise.”
And I just couldn’t help myself. “What does Miles City have to do with anything?” I asked the floor.
“There are too many unhealthy influences here,” he answered. “We all think that it will be healing for you to have a change of scenery for a while.”
I finally looked up. “Who all?”
“All of us,” Ruth said, meeting my eyes, her own puffed up and mottled with mascara, the return of Sad Clown Ruth.
“What about Grandma?”
Ruth’s face wadded up and she had to cover her mouth again, and Crawford jumped in quick and said, “Your grandmother wants what’s best for you, just like the rest of us. This isn’t about punishment, Cameron. I hope you understand how much bigger than that this is.”
I said, fast and mumbled, “I want to talk to Grandma myself,” and I stood up to leave, to go downstairs.
But Ruth stood up too and she said, loud and sharp like a thumbtack, close to my face, “She doesn’t want to talk about this! She is just sick about this, she’s sick about it! We all are.”
She might as well have slapped me. Ray and Crawford were both doing these O’s with their mouths as if she had. I sat back down and we continued on with our chat and we had everything decided within the hour. Ruth would drive me to the God’s Promise Christian Discipleship Program the following Friday. I would be staying for at least the entire school year, two semesters—with breaks at Christmas and Easter. We’d see how things had progressed after that.
Before he left, Pastor Crawford said a long prayer in which he asked for God’s help in my recovery; then he hugged us all, even me. I let him, and afterward he handed me a manila envelope of application forms and rules for admittance that he’d had Reverend Rick fax over. The fee, by the way, was $9,650 per year, to be paid for with money left from Mom and Dad’s estate, an education fund they’d set up for me. Simple enough.
Part Three
God’s Promise
1992–1993
Chapter Thirteen
It was Jane Fonda who gave Ruth and me our official welcome tour of the God’s Promise Christian School & Center for Healing. We were in the Fetus Mobile for six hours straight before getting there. Six hours straight except for when Ruth pulled into the Git ’n’ Split in Big Timber to get gas and treats and to let me pee. Ruth didn’t even go. She could hold it like a camel.
Back then Big Timber still had the only water park in Montana, and it sat right alongside the interstate. When we passed, I craned to see the strange toothpaste-green looping slides as they towered out of a field housing cement vats of too-blue water. The place was packed.
It was the last good week of August, and even whizzing by like that, I could feel the urgency in the actions of the kids as they swarmed about the place. Everything was heightened the way it always is when summer is slipping away
to fall, and you’re younger than eighteen, and all you can do is suck your cherry Icee and let the chlorine sting your nose, all the way up into the pockets behind your eyes, and snap your towel at the pretty girl with the sunburn, and hope to do it all again come June. I turned around in my seat and kept staring until I could just barely make out those green twisting slides. They seemed like tunnels from a science fiction version of the future, with the charcoal and purple Crazy Mountains all stretched out behind them like they didn’t fit at all, like painted scenery at the school play.
At the Git ’n’ Split Ruth bought string cheese and little cartons of chocolate milk and a tube of Pringles. She offered them up in the Fetus Mobile as though she was bearing frankincense and myrrh.
“I hate sour cream and onion Pringles,” I told the dashboard, where I had my feet planted until Ruth pushed them down.
“But you love Pringles.” Ruth actually rattled the canister.
“I hate sour cream and onion anything. All lesbians do.” I blew heaps of bubbles into my milk with the tiny straw that came cellophaned to the carton.
“I want you to stop using that word.” Ruth jammed the lid back onto the can.
“Which word? Sour or cream?” I plastic laughed with my reflection in the passenger-side window.
I had spent the week postintervention moving from numbness to outright, unabashed hostility toward Ruth, while she, on the other hand, became increasingly talkative and positive about my situation. She busied herself with the many arrangements to be made on my behalf: buying me dorm supplies, talking to Hazel about my early retirement from Scanlan, filling out paperwork, scheduling my mandatory physical, helping Ray haul the phone and TV and VCR from my room. That arrangement came first, actually. But the biggest arrangement of all: She canceled the wedding. She postponed it, that is.
“Don’t,” I said. She hadn’t even told me she was doing it, actually. I surprised her in the kitchen, overheard her on the phone with the florist.
“It’s not the right time now,” Ruth had said. “The priority is getting you better.”
“I mean it: Don’t. Don’t stop the show for me; I’ll live with not being there.”
“It’s not about you, Cameron. It’s about me, and I don’t want to have it while you’re away.” She had left the room after that. But she was lying, of course. It was completely about me. Completely.
I had to be babysat at all times. Someone in my condition couldn’t very well be left alone. I met with Pastor Crawford each day, an hour or two at a go, but I never said much of anything. They were just Nancy Huntley sessions with God thrown in. I ate breakfast with Ruth, lunch with Ruth, dinner with Ruth and Ray. I stared out my window a lot. One afternoon I thought I saw Ty circling our block in his truck, around and around. I’m sure I did. But he never pulled up to the curb, put it in park; never charged up the stairs to teach me the violent version of the very same lesson God’s Promise would be attempting to teach me soon.
During my lockdown Ruth was Ruth: chipper—forced, but chipper. Ray was Ray: quiet and even more unsure of what to say to me. And Grandma was nowhere. That whole week she ghosted around the house, wouldn’t find herself alone in a room with me, took off in the Bel Air to who knows where for hours at a time. We ended up in the kitchen together one afternoon. I think she was hoping that I was still out meeting with Crawford, but I surprised her as she was mixing up a can of tuna with mayonnaise.
I didn’t try to be proud. I thought maybe I had just one chance. “I don’t want to go, Grandma,” I said.
“Don’t look at me, girl,” she said, still mixing the mayo in thick. “You brought this on yourself. This is all your doing, every last bit of it. I don’t know as Ruth’s way is right, but I know you need some straightening out.”
I don’t think she realized that her word choice was sort of funny, and it wasn’t really, right then, anyway.
“You’ll be fine,” she said, putting the mayo back into the door of the fridge, taking out the jar of sweet relish she wasn’t supposed to eat. “You do what they say. Read your Bible. You’ll be just fine.”
It seemed like she was saying it as much for her as for me, but that’s where the conversation stopped. I only saw her once more before we left. She emerged from the basement as we were loading the FM, gave me a loose hug that grew a little tighter right before she let go.
“I’ll write you some, once it’s allowed. You write too,” she said.
“Not for three months,” I said.
“You’ll be okay. It will fly by.”
Lindsey called once, she just happened to, probably wanted to know what I thought of the care package, but Ruth answered the phone, told her that I’d be going away to school this year and wouldn’t be able to continue to communicate with her any longer. Just like that. I’m pretty sure she tried calling back, but I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone. Jamie stopped by and Ruth at least let him come into the entryway, but she hovered in the other room, made it obvious that she was listening.
“Everybody knows now, huh?” I asked him. It didn’t seem like there was any point wasting words by talking around the only thing worth talking about right then.
“They know one version,” Jamie said. “Brett’s been telling people. I don’t think Coley has.”
“Well, it’s the only version they’d believe, anyway,” I said.
“Probably.”
He hugged me fast, told me he’d see me at Christmas if the warden allowed it. That made me laugh.
I could have snuck out. I could have made secret phone calls. I could have rallied forces on my behalf. I could have. I could have. I didn’t. I didn’t even try.
By an hour outside of Miles City, Ruth had already given up on lecturing me on appreciating God’s gift of a facility like this right in my own state. I think she had given up on instilling in me a positive attitude before we even got on the road, but she quoted some scripture and walked through her lines as though she had written her little speech out beforehand. And knowing Ruth, she probably had—maybe in her daily prayer journal, maybe on the back of a grocery list. Ruth’s words were so stale by that point that I didn’t even hear most of them. I looked out my window with my nose tucked into my shoulder and smelled Coley. I was wearing one of her sweatshirts even though it was too hot for it. Ruth thought it was mine or she would have piled it into the cardboard box with the other things of Coley’s, of ours, that she and Crawford had confiscated, many of those things items from our friendship and not necessarily from whatever it was that we’d become those last few weeks: snapshots, lots of them prom-night pictures; notes written on lined paper and folded to the size of fifty-cent pieces; the thick wad of rubber-banded movie tickets, of course those; and also a couple of pressed thistles, once huge and thorny and boldly purple, now dried and feathery and the ghost of their original color, dust in your hand if you squeezed too hard, and Ruth did. The thistles I’d picked at Coley’s ranch, hauled back into town, and tacked upside down to the wall above my desk. But the sweatshirt, buried at the bottom of my laundry basket beneath clean but not-yet-folded beach towels and tank tops, had escaped. It still smelled like the kegger campfire at which she’d last worn it and something else I couldn’t place, but something unmistakably Coley.
For miles and miles I just let Ruth drone. I let her words crumble away between us, drop like those thistles into dusty bits on the seats and the console. All the while I smelled Coley, and thought Coley, and wondered when I would start hating Coley Taylor, just how long it would take for that to happen, because I wasn’t anywhere near that place yet, but I thought that maybe I should be. Or that maybe I would be one day. Eventually Ruth stopped talking to me and twisted the dial until she found Paul Harvey and laughed like she was drunk and had never heard mild radio humor before.
Those whole six hours, the only other snips of dialogue between us, other than the Pringles incident, were:
Ruth: Please roll up your window; I have the AC on.
Me:
And this affects me how?
Ruth: I wish you would stop slumping like that. You’re rounding your shoulders and you’ll end up an old lady with a hump.
Me: Good. It will go nicely with the horns I’m working on.
Ruth: I know that you read your manual, Cammie; I saw you. It says you have to enter Promise with a teachable heart if you want this to work.
Me: Maybe I don’t have a heart, teachable or otherwise.
Ruth: Don’t you want this to work? I just can’t understand why anyone would want to stay like this if they knew they could change.
Me: Stay like what?
Ruth: You know exactly what.
Me: No I don’t. Say it.
Ruth: Stay in a life of sinful desire.
Me: Is that the same category for premarital sex?
Ruth: (Long pause.) What is that supposed to mean?
Me: I wonder.
Only a few miles before the turnoff to Promise we passed the sign for Quake Lake. It was battered and the metal was crunched in the middle, as though it had fallen down and been driven over by a semi and then put back up. I think Ruth and I noticed it at right the same time, and she turned to me, actually took her eyes from the road to look at me, for just a few seconds. But Ruth somehow managed not to say anything. And I didn’t say anything. And then we turned a corner and it was just trees and road in the rearview and that sign wasn’t some big signifier at all, but just one more place marker we’d driven by on our way. At least that’s what we both pretended right then.
The girl who met us in the Promise parking lot had an orange clipboard, a Polaroid camera, and a prosthetic right leg (from the knee down). She seemed about my age, high school for sure, and she waved that clipboard while walking toward the FM with surprising speed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: She was wearing running shorts.
Ruth didn’t even have the chance to say something like “Oh, lookit this poor thing” before the poor thing herself was at Ruth’s door, throwing it open and flashing a picture, all in what seemed to me the same moment.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 23