If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (12 page)

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I
t’s gotta be hard for her,” I said as we walked up Starfish Avenue to Comanche Street. “You know, first the baby, then Allie flipping out like that.”

“He treated her like shit,” Liz said.

“But he dug her,” I said. “You could see it, when they hung out together. At least sometimes.”

“Do you always have to be such a fucking Pollyanna?” Liz asked.

Nanny snorted. “Someone has to, when you’re around,” she said. It was true. Liz had always been the lippiest of the three of us, but lately her sarcasm was beyond borderline; it was just plain bitchy.

“Ha! Look who’s talking,” Liz said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nanny asked.

Liz laughed. “‘What’s that supposed to mean,’” she said. “You treat Voodoo like shit. You’re mad at him all the time because he’s not that asshole Tony Fury. Why he puts up with it, I don’t know.”

“Oh, that’s deep, man,” Nanny said sarcastically. “That’s really intense. You’re just jealous because Cory what’s-his-face wouldn’t know you were alive if you weren’t balling him on a road show down Sunrise Highway—” Nanny stopped then, her eyes wide. She realized she’d gone too far.

Liz’s face was tomato red; for a minute she looked like she might cry. And then she tossed her hair backward, away from her face. “At least he knows I’m a woman,” she said. “Not some stupid little girl who can’t—”

“How’d we get here?” I said. “We were talking about Ginger. Why are we all on each other’s cases now? It’s too hot for this shit, let’s just give it a rest—”

Liz put up her middle finger. “Give
this
a rest,” she said, and strode away from us, the bow on the back of her halter top bouncing against her skin.

“What is with her?” I asked. I was upset. I never liked the look of a retreating back.

Nanny shrugged. “Something to do with Cory the great squeeze, I’m sure,” she said. She lifted her hair off the back of her neck, twisting it on top of her head. “I shouldn’t have said what I said. But it’s true, Katie, you’ve said so yourself, and sometime she’ll have to know it, too.”

•   •   •

J
esus freaks were few in Elephant Beach. They were a ragtag group that had taken over the abandoned yarn store on Sea Grove Avenue and made it into a church of sorts; the name, Holy Light of Heaven Spiritual Sanctuary, was etched in charcoal above the burglar bars on the broken windows that faced the street. Some of the kids from the Dunes, the rich part of town, dabbled in Jesus during senior year, the ones who weren’t following the guru Maharishi and flying to India on their fathers’ credit cards. They’d walk the halls at school flaunting their newfound spirituality, dressed all in white, looking like deranged brides with their ethereal gazes that never met yours and their phony smiles that always seemed crooked. There were Jesus freaks working at Nature’s Choice, the tiny health-food store on Buoy Boulevard that always smelled of rotting lentils; they’d smile and smile and tell you that Jesus loved you every time they rang up a purchase. (Liz once pointed out that although they worked in a health-food store they always looked pale and sickly and emaciated while at the A&P, where the food was supposedly laden with chemicals and pesticides, everyone looked ruddy and well fed and healthy.) When you walked by the Holy Light of Heaven Spiritual Sanctuary, it was usually dark and you couldn’t see in the windows. Sometimes, you could hear singing that was supposed to sound joyous but often sounded flat and toneless because the church couldn’t afford an organ or even a beat-up piano to accompany the hymns. Around town,
every once in a while you’d come upon a sign hanging on a tree or a telephone pole, painted in crooked block letters that read “Jesus Wants You,” or, simply, “Jesus.” Members of some of the real churches in town complained at the council meetings that it was a sacrilege, but were told that the police would have to actually catch someone in the act of putting up a sign to take action, and so far, that hadn’t happened. When those church people took it upon themselves to take down the signs, others would almost immediately spring up in their places.

The irony was that Ginger was led to Jesus by the skeevy-looking stranger who’d shoved her into Mitch’s arms that night in front of The Starlight Hotel. He’d sought her out a couple of days later, when he saw her walking off the beach, her tee shirt and cutoffs plastered to her body after she’d gone swimming fully clothed. Ginger hadn’t lost the weight she’d gained when she was pregnant and thought she looked too fat for even a one-piece bathing suit; her peach-colored tee shirt clung to her chest and darkened her nipples. The stringy stranger caught up to her by the ticket booth and began apologizing. Ginger had no idea who he was or what he was talking about. “It was the night I fell from grace,” he explained, in a voice that sounded surprisingly sweet. “I had closed my heart to Jesus and opened my mouth to liquor after abstaining for nineteen solid months. Jesus forgave me, all right, but how do I forgive myself?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Ginger asked, moving past him, bumping against his bony shoulder.

“Sister,” he called after her, and later Ginger told us there was something in his voice that made her turn back and really look into his eyes.

“My name is Casey,” he said solemnly, holding out his hand.

“I’m Ginger,” she said, and they stood together, talking, until the sun lowered and the waves relaxed and the beach became almost empty as everyone trailed past them to get home in time for dinner.

They started hanging out together and we realized why Casey looked
familiar: he and several other Jesus freaks shared a house at the corner of Skylark Lane, right up the street from Eddy’s. The Jesus freak church farther uptown hadn’t anything even remotely resembling a rectory, and rents in the Trunk were always cheaper than anywhere else, except where the blacks and Puerto Ricans lived. Casey and the rest of the freaks had moved into a worn and weathered yellow bungalow that badly needed painting; there was a side yard, unusual for the Trunk, enclosed by a chain-link fence, where nothing grew except mud-streaked crab-grass. There were sheets on the windows instead of curtains and the windows were filmy with grime. Counting Casey, there were seven people living in the house, and a baby who would crawl through the yellow grass in the yard seemingly unsupervised. You’d rarely see any signs of life during the day, but at night, they’d come out and sit in a circle on the parched patch of lawn, bowing their heads, mumbling things that no one could hear. We’d see them on Sundays, piling into a dirty white van parked in front, on their way to the Holy Light of Heaven Spiritual Sanctuary, where Casey was the new preacher.

Ginger had never met anyone like Casey. He never pressured her or preached to her privately, but he asked if she’d like to accompany him to evening prayers some night and, curious, she said yes. She went with Casey and the rest of the Jesus freaks to the deserted barge by the bay, where they made a circle with their hands locked, their eyes closed (though Ginger said she opened hers when she thought she heard the clamoring of water rats in the hold below). “It’s such a rush, man,” she told us, after, her eyes shining. “It’s like—even the air smells better after, like purer, you know?” Ginger started spending more time at the crumbling yellow bungalow. Sometimes, she and Casey would walk down Lighthouse Avenue and cross the street, licking vanilla fudge ice-cream cones like fifteen-year-olds out on their first date.

“It was the drinking that made him act so ugly,” she defended him, when we started asking skeptical questions.

“Cat was born ugly,” Mitch said out of the side of his mouth, watching
Casey come out of Eddy’s carrying two sugar cones covered with sprinkles. It wasn’t just his broken teeth and pockmarked skin, either; Casey and his disciples didn’t look spiritual, like Father Donnelly or the Sisters of Sodality, who lit the incense every morning at St. Timothy’s Church. They looked like people you would be scared of if you weren’t in a familiar place. They looked like the guys who ran the Ferris wheel on the boardwalk in the center of town, with their pointy studded boots and faded jean jackets, huddled in the abandoned arcades with their heads down and their collars turned up, cigarettes dangling from their lips, managing to look tough and frail at the same time. You could just imagine the needle falling out of their arms. The girls they hung around with were like a flock of fragile birds, hunched and furtive-looking in their thrift-shop dresses, always glancing over their shoulders as though they thought someone was following them. We asked Ginger which one was the mother of the baby, and she said the baby’s name was Elijah and he belonged to everyone. “Isn’t that beautiful, man?” she said, her eyes shining. She ignored our smirking, our scornful laughter.

Still, Casey did get Ginger to quit drinking. Drinking and drugging. He did it slowly and skillfully. He’d go over to her mother’s apartment on Gull Lane and sit and listen to Ginger talk, nodding thoughtfully, and then very gently take the bottle of Old Grand-Dad from her lips and set it on the coffee table and begin talking to her about quenching her spiritual thirst. The first time he said that, she told us, she laughed in his face, told him he was full of shit, but he just kept nodding and smiling, his eyes locked firmly on her face. She’d never had that kind of attention before, not even when she was balling somebody, or really, especially when she was balling somebody; they weren’t looking at her face, then. And he’d ask her questions about herself, her life, like what was it like living in the city when she was little, and did she miss having a father, and one day, she put the bottle down on the coffee table all by herself and began crying. Casey just kept talking in soft, comforting tones, urging her, believing in her. He never put his arm around her, but he would
lay his hand on Ginger’s and hold it while she cried, a strong and steady presence. He asked her to come to the Holy Light of Heaven Spiritual Sanctuary one Sunday morning in mid-July and she described it to us like she’d been to a Jethro Tull concert and made out with Ian Anderson on the stage. “That whole thing where you see the light?” she said. “Like in movies or something, where you’re supposed to get hit by a bolt of lightning or some shit? It’s not like that at all, man, like you’ve failed if you don’t get the shivers or start foaming at the mouth. It’s like, it’s gradual, you know? Like you have all this time. Jesus doesn’t keep a stopwatch.”

“Maybe it is a good thing,” I said one night, when we were hanging out on Liz’s porch before heading out. “I mean, she does seem happy. Happier than she’s been, for sure.”

Liz snorted. “And you think she’s really not balling this guy?”

Nanny shrugged. “She says no. And why would she lie? She’s never lied before.”

I couldn’t fathom Ginger wanting to ball him. I thought Casey resembled something sleazy and reptilian; his bones seemed oily, fluid, as though any minute he could sink into the sand and slither away. His eyes were dark and wallowing in salvation that made him appear humble, but I remembered the sound of his laughter the night that Ginger had thrown herself at him, the way he had flung her off and turned his back. For all his talk of light, there seemed to be shadows everywhere.

Ginger begged us to come to the Jesus freak church and hear Casey preach, and though we never did, we heard plenty about his sermons because she couldn’t shut up about him. She called him her savior. “But he says it’s really not him, see, he’s only Christ’s vessel. Jesus used Casey as the vessel to come to me, to take me into his loving arms.” She couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t give him a chance. “He’s a man of God,” she said in her new serene voice. “You all go to church, you worship Jesus and his father and Mother Mary. How is it different?”

“Because we’re not a bunch of lunatics walking around town all
hollow-eyed and shit, putting up signs that look like they were drawn by a second grader,” Liz said. “Dig it, there’s a reason they call them freaks.”

“But why are you so angry?” Ginger asked, wonder in her voice. Her eyes were clear, dedicated. She was sitting on the couch in her mother’s apartment with her legs tucked underneath her dress. It was a pretty dress, pink with faded green stripes across the bodice; she’d bought it at the Thrift Shift up on Buoy Boulevard. That’s where all the Jesus freaks shopped; they had no money for the other stores in town. “You shouldn’t be so angry,” she continued. “What Casey’s preaching—it’s the way it’s really supposed to be. Like—in regular church, right, it’s all about robes and the gold on the altar and how much everyone gives when they pass the basket. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be,” she said gently. “The simple life, the one where you give up—worldliness, when you—live simply, without possessions. That’s the life worth living.”

“How can you give up worldliness when you live in the world?” Liz asked. I looked around the living room of Ginger’s mother’s apartment. That’s what the Jesus freaks always talked about, renouncing material possessions, but it was different for the Dunes girls at school, giving up their cashmere sweaters and shag carpeting and Princess telephones. What did Ginger have to renounce besides the rickety staircase in the hallway and a lopsided coffee table?

“You just don’t seem to—how can I make you understand?” Ginger spoke sadly, shaking her head. “I mean—maybe you do have to see it, man. Like I—I’ve seen all this new stuff lately, things I’ve never—okay, like last week, right, Casey took me out to this place, all the way out in Suffolk County, and there was this guy, right, this preacher, and all of a sudden, he starts speaking in tongues—”

“Speaking in tongues? What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s like—at first you think it’s gibberish, like he’s just spouting nonsense, but then you can see—you can tell it’s—it’s the language of
God!” Ginger’s eyes shone, but she wasn’t looking at any of us. She was looking at some private vision over our heads, out the window. “He’s going to teach us how to listen,” she said. “How to listen and learn—”

“Oh, for chrissake,” Liz said, disgusted. “You flunked English and beginners’ Spanish, now you’re talking in tongues?”