Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (10 page)

I wish I were back in Minnesota.

We take a black London taxi to Fortnum & Mason. In the tearoom, the three of us squeeze around a table for two.

“So, my dear,” Ham says (it comes out
dee-eh
), “tell me. How’s Claremont?”

“It’s okay. I guess.”

I look at Mom, who is eyeing me while she removes the cozy and pours the tea into the three cups. She’s gotten really into the tea thing. Right now she’s wondering if I’m going to be glum or up. She doesn’t like glum, and I’ll hear about it later if I’m not up. Several months after we moved here, feeling very depressed and homesick, I wrote a letter to my friend Diana back home. Word of it went from Diana to her mom to her grandma to my grandma to Mom, and then I got an earful.

“How can Dad successfully pursue his practice, and I my nursing, with this kind of … betrayal?”

I didn’t answer her, but I felt that it was I, not Mom or Dad or the Church, that had been betrayed.

I’m supposed to be
up
, like, all the time, or at least fake it.

“Do you like your roommate?” Ham asks. He is spreading a scone with Devonshire cream.

“I have five.”

“Five?”

I smile.

“Six of you in one room? Good God! Do you like your teachers?”

“They’re all doddery old spinsters.”

Ham grins, leaning his head back stiffly. He thinks I’m being
funny, but I’m totally serious. He slaps the café table with his hand, spilling the tea into the saucers.

It feels good
, I guess, to be in bed, in my own room at the top of this house. Sometimes at Claremont, after lights-out, I close my eyes and imagine that I am back in my canopied bed in Minnesota. I try to picture my grandma, and Ammie and Grandpa; Mimi, Diana, Mary. And James. I get so homesick that my chest tightens and my throat aches and I feel like I’m going to cry. But usually I don’t. One time my housemother, Mrs. Williams, sat on the edge of my bed and rubbed my back after she caught me crying. She told me that God is my true Father and Mother; I am always in God’s presence, and therefore always
at home
. I try to remind myself of this, and sometimes it works.

Despite what I said to Ham today, I don’t hate England anymore, at least not all the time. In some ways it’s easier being here than in Minnesota, although I would never admit that to my parents. Here, I never have awkward conversations about what Dad does. Everybody already
knows
what a Christian Science practitioner does. In fact, when Dad comes to Claremont for meetings—he sits on the social committee—he gets treated with a certain reverence. Not exactly guru status but almost VIP. Maybe it’s because he’s American, like Mary Baker Eddy. Or maybe it’s because the sight of any man at Claremont, where Mr. Fox is the lone male teacher, elicits awe.

It’s better now too, since I’m no longer the dumbest girl in my form. Commendations are posted on the notice board in the front hall at the bottom of the grand staircase for everyone to see. For the first four school terms, I didn’t get a single commendation. This term I received five, as many as Alice Arnold, which shocked everyone, especially me: English Lit, Geography, Scripture, Math, and French. I had to run my finger from my name across the commendations list to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

But I remind myself what Jesus said: “I can of mine own self
do nothing.” I have to give credit where credit is due. I prayed. A lot. Every morning after breakfast, during Quiet Time (when we all sat in the common room to read the Lesson), I would highlight anything in
Science and Health
with the word
Mind
in it. And every night before lights-out, I would go into the Quiet Room (our school’s own little version of a Christian Science Reading Room) and find something from
Science and Health
or the Bible, opening to a random page. Sometimes it was weird how relevant stuff was. Like, once:

Another time, I found this:

Of course, sometimes you open to the Old Testament and get verse after verse of who begat whom.

I look at my alarm clock. It is after midnight. Unable to sleep, I tiptoe down to Dad’s study to do some dialing. I never actually talk to anyone. Dad says long-distance charges are prohibitive. I just dial the long series of numbers, and wait for the familiar single ring tone, which is how I know I’ve reached the States. I let it ring a couple of times, and then I hang up. Sometimes when I call, it’s morning in London and the middle of the night in Minnesota, and someone will pick up before I can replace the phone on the hook. I hear a voice—that of Grandma, or Mimi—and I feel a surge of excitement, knowing that I am
connected
.

Tonight, I dial James’s number, James from seventh grade, and
when the phone starts to ring, I can picture him, with his blond hair and blue eyes. If he picks up the phone, I’ll want to say “Hi, James, it’s me! Lucia!” I’ll want to reminisce about the sock hop, or the breakfasts at Perkins. The phone keeps ringing, and I remember the thrill of him holding me at the waist to pull the tire swing way back.

It just keeps ringing. He must be out. I hang up, disappointed.

Next I dial Mimi. I count twenty rings. No answer. I wonder what she’s doing tonight, Saturday. She—and everyone—must be at some party.

Finally, I dial Grandma, and she picks up after the first ring.

“Hyello.”

I am caught off guard.

“Hyello?” Her lovely voice sounds so close, like I could almost squeeze her hand.
Grandma, it’s me! Lucia!

But then I remember: Dad will kill me. So I hang up. The adrenaline wanes, the excitement deflates. I am no longer connected.

It’s Sunday morning
. I don’t want to go back to Claremont. I haven’t done my homework, and I have three tests tomorrow.

Mom has already left for Hawthorne House to work her shift. She’ll be gone all day, and I may or may not see her before I leave for the train. I wonder what she does, exactly, after she puts on her white nurse’s uniform and heads out the door. I’ve never set foot in Hawthorne House, a redbrick building near the highest point in Hampstead. I wonder if people ever die there, or if they all get healed. I wonder if any of the guests are kids.

Dad and I are supposed to go to Sunday school because he teaches the sixth formers—Olivia’s age-group—at Eleventh Church. I don’t want to go there either. I hate Sunday school; it’s so boring.

I hear Dad climb the stairs to the third floor, where Olivia’s and my bedrooms both are, to see if I’m ready to go. I am still in bed.

“C’mon! Up’n at ’em, madam,” he says, clapping his hands like he used to when I still lived at home.

I tell him I’m not feeling well. He tries to entice me with an offer of burgers at the Great American Disaster after church, but I don’t take the bait.

“Dad, I feel gross,” I say and groan.

He sits down at the edge of my bed and asks if I’d like him to do some protective work.

“Sure,” I say and roll over. Protective work is praying.

We sit there in silence for a while, and I wonder if he can tell I’m faking it.

“Mrs. Eddy says, ‘Every sort of sickness is error,—that is, sickness is loss of harmony,’ ” my father quotes.

I writhe, just a bit. “Dad, my stomach hurts.”

“I want you to hold fast to that thought,” he says, patting my leg. “Let’s try to think about ways to find harmony in Life.
Harmony
, really, is another word for balance. Sickness is imbalance, discord.”

“I feel like I’m going to barf,” I say, just above a whisper.

“Hmm … maybe you
should
stay home this morning,” he says.

I’m glad he can’t see my face.

“But I do have to teach Sunday school. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ll give it some good thought”—another term for praying—“and if you need anything, you can call Mom at Hawthorne House. She’s not off until this evening, but I’m sure she can come home early, if need be.”

After I hear Dad leave, I feel almost giddy at the success of my ploy. I have at least two hours to study and do my homework. But first, I go down to the second floor, to my parents’ bedroom, and turn on the TV.

I fall asleep in my parents’ bed and don’t wake up until I hear Dad.

“Loosh?” he hollers from the front door.

Oh no. I look at the clock on the bedside table. I’ve been asleep for almost three hours.

“Lucia?”

“I’m in here,” I yell back. “I’m in your room.”

I haven’t done my homework or studied for my tests. I can’t go back to Claremont.

“How are you doing?” Dad says and sits down on the end of the bed. “Are you feeling any better?”

“Not really. My stomach hurts.” I wince and close my eyes. What am I going to do?

I think back to last December in Egypt. Mom got sick.
Really
sick. We had to stay in Luxor an extra day—Christmas Day—and Sherman, Olivia, and I waited, frightened and stunned, in an adjoining room while Mom and Dad prayed. (Or Dad prayed; Mom couldn’t.) Nobody in our family had ever been sick before, not really. From our side of the thin wall, all we could hear was groaning. Mom shivered with such intensity that the sound of the accompanying moans undulated like an old woman’s wails, even from where we were in our room. We sat on the beds, or stood at the window or with one ear to the wall. We could make out only that Mom was at times freezing and then, almost immediately, too hot. The complete lack of communication from Dad, except for when he asked for our blankets, heightened our fear.

Two of us would walk down to the hotel restaurant to order grilled chicken, bread, and Cokes, while the other remained in the room. As scary as it was to be holed up in the hotel room, leaving it was even more frightening.

The only other sound we heard was the haunting, periodic call to worship from the nearby mosque, which made us feel all the more displaced and isolated. As the hours slowly crept, our fear grew to terror. Was Mom getting worse? How long would this go on?

After a day and a half, we decided that Olivia should talk to Dad. She knocked gently on the door, and eventually he opened it, barely.

“Would it be okay—if maybe—we called a doctor?” Olivia asked tentatively.

“No,” Dad said vehemently, clenching his teeth, the door wedged open just enough to show the middle third of his face. “No. Your mom is going to be fine.”

He knew from our faces that we doubted him.

“Mom needs each of us to do our part,” he said.

“Please, Dad?” we said, unified. He lowered his gaze and shook his head no.

“Besides,” he said, “look where we are. Luxor isn’t London. I’m not sure we’d want to go to a hospital here anyway, even if we weren’t Scientists.”

“Oh, Heff,” Mom moaned again from the bed, “that’s … too much … light.”

Dad closed the door, and we faced one another. I wished we could have at least gotten a glimpse of our mom. With no other options, we resolved through tears to sing some hymns, the Mary Baker Eddy ones.

Amazingly, Mom got better. On our fourth morning in Luxor, she emerged from their room thinner and famished but otherwise fine, and we resumed our tour of Egypt. I more or less forgot about the healing until March, when Mom wrote me a letter to say she’d given a testimony about it at church.

“Uuugh,” I say to my dad.

I pull the covers around me. I shiver—just a bit—tensing the muscles in my rib cage and squeezing my elbows into my sides. I wonder: If Mom had gotten sick here in London, instead of in Luxor, would Dad have brought her to a hospital? I open my eyes enough to see that Dad’s eyes are closed, and his head is bobbing. He does this sometimes when he is deep in prayer.

If I play this right, maybe I can stay home one more night. Go back to Claremont late.

“Dad, would you get me another blanket?” I ask. “I’m chilled.”

He goes to Sherman’s room, which is next to theirs, pulls the comforter off the bed, and brings it to me. I feel sort of bad, how he’s spreading it out so gently, tucking it in around the sides to make a contour of my shivering, curled-up body.

“Thanks, Dad,” I say and roll over again. He leaves the room.

I lie there, feeling fine, almost baffled at my brilliance, and wonder how long I should wait before I call him in again. I decide thirty-five minutes.

Thirty-five minutes is a very long time to lie in bed feeling totally okay with nothing to do: I can’t watch television (even if there
were
something good on, but this is the BBC, not American TV, which is why I fell asleep in the first place); I can’t study, because my books are upstairs. All I can do is lie here, thinking about Dad in the next room, at his desk, doing his protective work for me.
Is he scared? Does he worry that, unlike in Luxor, maybe this time he won’t be effective?
I stare at the alarm clock on his bedside table, willing the hands to move faster. My friends at Claremont are probably just leaving the dining hall.