In the Wilderness (16 page)

“Mom and Dad will be mad. And Uncle Ronnie.”

“Don’t you worry about them. This is between you and me. Next time you want to shave your legs, you tell me and I’ll let you use my Lady Norelco.”

“But I’m not supposed to …”

“I don’t know what they’re thinking.” She set the cast-iron skillet down hard on the burner and lobbed in a big spoonful of Crisco. “Big girl like you, already having her monthly. They should know you need to do these things.”

Whenever my grandmother talked to me like this, I felt both pleased and sickened. I didn’t like attention being brought to my body and its changes, yet she seemed to understand something my parents did not. As she cut up the chicken and dusted it in flour, I felt my fear subside. I didn’t know what I’d tell my parents or my uncle, but Nan would protect me.

More and more, I was beginning to sense how different my family was. I watched the commercials on Nan’s television, intrigued by the laughing, nearly naked teenagers running across the beach with their ice-cold Pepsis, and I slowly came to understand that I could be like them if … If what? My parents would never allow me to buy a bikini, much less mingle
with boys on a beach while wearing one. But those young men and women seemed so happy, and there was nothing detectably dark in their pleasure. I saw the girls’ long, smooth legs and perfect hair. Was it a sin that I wanted to be like them?

Compared with the other girls my age, I felt childish and dowdy. Compared with what I saw on TV, my family lived in the Dark Ages. Without the Langs, especially Luke, to validate my adherence to the laws of dress and behavior, I felt isolated. Even my grandmother (my
grandmother!)
thought us ignorant and old-fashioned.

I studied my body in the big bathroom mirror, sucked in my stomach and threw my shoulders back to enhance the jut of my breasts. I let my hair fall across one eye and pouted seductively at my own image. Not bad. Digging through Nan’s toiletries I found a cake of Maybelline and a tiny red brush. I moistened the bristles and worked up a suitable goo, which I combed onto my lashes. Up close, the mascara looked “gommed on,” as my mother would say—balled up and flaking—but if I stood back against the wall, my eyes took on a shadowed glamour. I dipped into a compact of oily rouge and rubbed it high on my cheeks, then made a kiss of my lips and circled them in Parisian Red.

What I saw in the mirror thrilled me: color, contrast, a face that might draw the attention of young men like the ones whose faces adorned my wall. I looked like a ruined woman. Even the sound of it was delicious.

I studied myself long and hard, memorizing that other I could become with a few strokes of paint, before scrubbing my face raw with hot water and soap. I would keep my twin safe, keep her existence a secret. I dried my skin and caught a reflection of my plain self. The washing had pinkened my cheeks; my lips still held a taint of red.

•   •   •

By the end of the summer we’d moved into our new home. It was not far from downtown and belonged to a retired doctor, who had graciously lowered the rent when my mother offered to do extra upkeep. It was enormous, a white stucco bungalow with a hacienda-style porch and a red tile roof. For the first time in my life, I both heard the word “breakfast nook” and saw one, and it was ours. Off the utility room was a greenhouse with heated growing beds; grapevines covered its roof like ivy.

The backyard grew thick with exotic ferns and roses. In one corner, beneath the overhanging limbs of a weeping birch, a pond held goldfish the size of large trout. A miniature cement bridge crossed over, and on the other side was my favorite spot: a small patio and bench, surrounded by lush green plants. It was a hiding place, cool and sheltered, and I’d lie on my stomach, watching the carp flash in the dappled light, silver and orange, white and black—a combination of colors I had never imagined in a fish that size.

We moved our few pieces of furniture into the house, and still our voices echoed off the walls. Above the fireplace, a huge gilt-edged mirror reflected the emptiness. The dining room was sad, I thought, because we didn’t own a real dinette, although there was a certain holiday flair to throwing a colorful sheet across the borrowed redwood picnic table and setting places for the family beneath the sparkling crystal chandelier.

There was no place for a television. My father thought it better to read, and our faith held that Satan’s influence had manifested itself via the auspices of ABC, NBC and CBS. On any given night one could witness the decay of Christian civilization on Channel 3: uncensored
hells
and
damns
, women wantonly exposing their midriffs and cleavage, couples engaged
in passionate kissing. And the music! Young people gyrating on the stage of
American Bandstand
, flailing about as though possessed.

This is how it would happen, just as it had at Sodom and Gomorrah, just as it had at the fall of Rome: all the sins of the flesh, the drinking and gluttony and adultery, the unnatural couplings, the orgies, the idolatry, everything was coming to pass just as the Bible predicted. Soon, very soon, we believed, Christ would return. Weren’t we already seeing the final preparations, the crime and disregard for God’s law, the wars and famines, earthquakes and persecution of the chosen people?

We awaited the Rapture, longed for it, prayed for it, several times a day looked to the sky to be the first to see the clouds separate, the golden light shine through, Christ descend with his army of angels. “Please, God,” we prayed, “come now and deliver us from this world of despair, this den of evil, fly us to Heaven to live forever in the light of your love.”

We were prepared, ready to enter our new bodies, to hear our names called, to receive our rewards. We would leave the nonbelievers behind to face the Tribulation—that time when the Antichrist would make himself known (even now, we believed, he may be alive, biding his time, eating and drinking with mortal ease), when every man, woman and child must be branded or tattooed on the wrist or forehead with 666—the Mark of the Beast. The Seven Seals would be opened, false prophets perform wondrous signs and miracles, and for seven years those yet willing to denounce Satan would be tormented and tortured beyond seeming human endurance. Even the Jews would turn to Christ, and for doing so would incur the greatest outpouring of Satan’s wrath.

Until that time, true Christians must gird their loins with abstinence from worldly things, lest they too become mesmerized
by the profane offerings of Satan bent on increasing his army, determined to take as many as he could with him in his final fall into the fires of hell. Each day presented new trials and temptations—lies to tell, money to covet, bodies to lust after. To be free of all desire was to be free of potential sin.

Having left Luke’s presence, I thought I might exist in a state blessed by moral continence. I was twelve, and I had no idea what the world might yet lay on the table before me; I never imagined that what might tempt me was not desire for wine or food, money or sex, but desire for something even more insidious: some sense of myself as a girl becoming a woman, coming to age in a landscape empty of anything that might define her worth except as a good daughter and future wife.

These were my horizons: to remain virtuous, to marry a modest man, to provide him with a clean house and an attractive body, to bear his children and raise them accordingly. To want anything else was an act of selfishness and betrayal of my predetermined role—mutiny, pure and simple. Such women, I was made to understand, those who neglected their husbands and families, who pursued their own interests outside the circle of kin and church, were doomed by their weak nature to be sucked down. You could find them in any bar, hiking their skirts, leaving thick smears of lipstick on their whiskey glasses. If as I came into womanhood I should choose to make such a bed, I would most certainly lie in it eternally damned.

I settled into my basement room, larger than many of the shacks we had lived in. I lay in bed that first night, gauging the darkness against the city’s sounds skipping closer, then more distant, like the radio shows my father used to tune in, ear to the Zenith’s speaker, catching the music and strange
voices that drifted to us in the hollow from up and down the Pacific Coast. But the new sounds seemed even more foreign—sirens, tires screeching, the continual hum of cars on their way to or from destinations I could not imagine.

I found I couldn’t sleep with the noise and turned on the small transistor radio my cousins had given me for my birthday. The hard-driving beat the church believed incited lust filled the room, and I lowered the volume and listened until the song ended. Then George Harrison was singing “My Sweet Lord.” Beneath the covers I held the music to my ear, hearing the words repeated again and again:
I really want to see you, I really want to be with you but it takes so long my Lord
…

I was stunned. Was this worship or sacrilege? George was one of The Beatles and off limits to Christians, but this song seemed different. I remembered playing “Hey Jude” with Luke in the empty church, and I sensed in this song the same kind of spiritual melancholy. But hadn’t one of The Beatles said they were more popular than Jesus? Maybe that had been John. Maybe George didn’t believe it. There was nothing in the song that seemed evil, and George wasn’t screeching like some drug-crazed fiend. But maybe this was part of the world’s seduction: overt evil was easily discernible to the righteous; it was the backdoor variety you had to watch out for, that kind that made you rationalize, made you think you were safe.

I listened until the announcer broke in with his revving parlance, wishing I could hear the song again. Even though I liked my room and our new house, I felt lonely, a little lost. My parents slept in their room upstairs, and Greg had the room next to mine, but something about the largeness of the house and all the walls and carpet we could not fill or cover left me hollow. The music filled the space around me, and I
found it comforting. As I listened, knowing that hours were passing only by what the voice told me, even the more raucous lyrics lost much of their ominousness. I liked the sound of the deejay’s voice and the way he introduced the songs like old friends, as though there was nothing more natural in the world than to be alone in a glass booth, talking to a microphone in the middle of the night.

In a way, we were alike, he and I, alone in our rooms, conversing with the air. Kevin was his name, and sometimes he asked me questions as though I could answer. “How ya doin tonight? Ready to
rock and roll?”

I fell asleep listening to Kevin. When I woke the next morning the radio lay on my pillow, its battery drained. That weekend I dug through Nan’s basement until I found the old electric radio I’d seen there and asked her if I could have it. It kept me company from that night on, and I fell asleep to the sounds of Smokey Robinson and Cher, Rod Stewart and The Cowsills. I’m not sure my parents knew how much the music had become a part of me, for if they had they might have taken the radio and destroyed it. Years later, it would be the thing I imagined they pointed to:
There. There is where the bad first started. Through the music of the world the evil entered her soul. That is how we almost lost her
.

We attended a different church each Sunday, trying to find the one that most closely resembled Cardiff Spur Mission, the one whose doctrine seemed most familiar. Some my father rejected because the minister was too soft on sin; others we did not return to because the pastor thought too much of himself and not enough of his flock. My father was absolutely set in his doctrine, much of which he had determined himself. If the board of elders allowed a divorced man to sit at its
meeting table, the entire church was opening itself up to sin. Did the church embrace predestination? Healing? Glossolalia? Full-immersion baptism? What was the role of women? How did the preacher’s wife comport herself? Was the youth pastor overly progressive, given more to gaining the young people’s favor than directing them down the narrow path?

Somehow, my parents settled on what I believed to be the least likely: the Assembly of God. Fundamental, certainly, but I didn’t see how this church could be any more different from the one we had left in Cardiff. The building itself was enormous: two double doors led into a foyer big enough to hold our former congregation; the sanctuary held hundreds. The choir wore purple robes, the preacher seldom lost himself in the throes of spiritual ecstasy, and the light shone through glass stained blue and green so that we all seemed to float in a landscape of water and grass.

The Assembly shared many of the same codes with the more rigid Pentecostals, but like city cousins shrugging off their country kin, the believers in the big church forsook many of the dress and behavior guidelines in favor of a more worldly existence: knees showed indelicately beneath the hems of dresses; rouge and light lipstick colored the women’s faces. Others there my age peered at me from behind their parents’ shoulders, taking in my long skirt and heavy glasses, and instead of feeling welcomed, once again part of a people who thought, acted and dressed as I did, I felt hopelessly outcast.

In Cardiff, we had been part of a community, a circle, joined with others who sang and prayed as we did. Even though our new fellow Christians spoke in tongues and professed to believe in miracles, they seemed less inclined to make a show of it all. My family bunched together at one end of a long and padded pew, holding tight to the belief that God could never approve of such giving in to the ways of the
world. We sat straight-backed and lowered our voices, feeling compromised but somehow more civilized in moderation.

I could not imagine then and still am not sure why my father chose this church as our new place of worship, but we attended faithfully. He has said he found peace there. He faced head-on one of his greatest tribulations, his shyness, in order to praise God, and stood in front of the audience of hundreds to sing “Satisfied Mind” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad.” I watched with nervous pride as he strummed his guitar on the big stage, his Wrangler slacks pressed to a fine shine, his Sunday boots—black eel skin—gleaming, his eyes closed.