In the Wilderness (24 page)

I was stunned with disbelief. Nothing had prepared me for this story of my life, a story that made of me a plotting adulteress, a betrayer of gross, unimaginable proportions. I shook my head, wanting to say
no, no, I’d never do that, I’d never
… but I had no breath to form the sounds, no chance of changing the vision Sister Lang had created of my lascivious nature.

There had been several times when Sarah had brought up veiled references to my sexual experience, her implication being that I had led a life of promiscuity. I never felt I had the right to protest, to set their thinking straight: I was a
virgin
, that magical designation that meant everything to a girl’s future on earth as well as in Heaven. Once, over a meal at the K mart cafeteria, I had shyly asked Brother Lang if he would perform the ceremony at my wedding. I didn’t understand the smirks and shared glances between the family members until Sarah said, “Daddy only marries virgins.” I’d nodded, too naive to believe she meant her comment to be cruel. I could no more register that kind of intent than I could begin to understand how Sister Lang believed me capable of seducing Terry. I was fourteen years old and had been cast in the role of Jezebel, whose story I knew well: for her sins against the believers she was thrown down into the street and made to be eaten by dogs; only her skull, hands and feet were left to be cast onto the field like dung.

I don’t remember how I found my way from that room. It’s as though a shade were drawn, leaving only the silhouettes of bodies and their coarse movement visible in my memory: no
detail, no emotion, no faces or fingers, just the dense and undefinable figures of people going on with their lives, and I somewhere among them.

I do know that I was shunned. Even though I continued to attend church, I sat alone in the long pew. I ate in silence, my throat constricting so that the food swelled in my mouth and I spat it into my napkin, afraid that if they saw my plate still full they might find more proof of my evil: demons feed not on flesh but on the spirit. Sleep became my only comfort. By some mercy I did not dream and welcomed the impenetrable darkness, feeling the water close over my head as though I were tied to a stone. And it is this I remember most: the sense of being anchored yet drifting languorously, like one drowned and made to love her own death.

The remaining days of the summer between my eighth-and ninth-grade years come to me in memory like smoke from a distant fire. Someone must have told me what day my parents would arrive to pick me up, and I awoke that morning, made my bed, packed my few belongings in a bag, then sat before my window and waited until Sister Lang called me downstairs.

I moved with my eyes down. I didn’t think, didn’t remember. What was in front of me commanded my full attention: dicing onions, grating cheese. Only when the car pulled into the driveway did I look up.

I greeted my parents kindly, as though they were old friends instead of blood kin. The dinner was served outside—a casserole and salad, a plain hamburger patty for my father—laid out on a cheerful, red-checked tablecloth. I ate and nodded in quiet agreement: Yes, the weather was good, the church was growing. No comment was directed toward me, no questions were asked. I had only to remain upright and silent not to shatter.

What my parents saw before them was a girl, modest and willing to acquiesce, a girl who bowed her head and said grace when asked. Were they stunned into the same state of unreality in which I found myself? Could this girl really be their daughter, the angry and spiteful child they hadn’t seen for months? Changes so dramatic and seemingly sudden can hardly be reconciled except in retrospect, and all that is left to ground us are the expected and familiar motions of the present: the salt must be passed, the ice cream served, the coffee perked.

After the dishes were washed, I gathered my things and climbed into the backseat. We pulled away from the church, my family and I. The Langs were waving, and in the sharp light of August, I could see Luke’s face, in his eyes nothing I recognized as regret or desire.

My brother was asleep almost immediately. His head rolled and nodded against the window until I pulled him gently down and pillowed his head in my lap. I had not seen the fields since late spring, and their golden color infused with the pink glow of twilight soothed me.

Nothing was spoken as the car glided silently across the prairie, its shadow growing and shrinking, absurdly deformed, finally swallowed by the earth’s umbra. It was then that I felt it well up, the panic and overwhelming pain, and I began without reason to tell it, from the end back to its beginning, as though in the unraveling I might find the cause, the one offending stitch.

The road passed evenly beneath us. Nothing broke the rhythm of my story, no one questioned or interrupted. When it was done, I leaned back exhausted, not caring what they understood or what they doubted. I had spoken it, had
brought it into the world, had made it real. In the rearview mirror I saw the small ruby glow of my father’s cigarette, brighter as he inhaled, then fading. Nearly dreaming, I heard the only words he would ever speak of that summer. He said, “I was afraid something like this might happen.” In his words I found comfort and I slept.

I do not know what meaning lay in my father’s words that night any more than I know what drove the Langs to accuse me of harboring demons. I do know that most often the possibilities are too dark to contemplate even now. I bundle myself in the safety of ambiguity and allow the vagaries of language to protect me.

I see how my life is often defined by the events of that summer, how my emotions are fenced by fear and distrust. And what a fourteen-year-old suffering her body’s own betrayal could not know about seduction I now understand: I seduced no one. I also know that I have no explanation for Sister Lang’s accusation. Remembering how carefully I shut myself down that day, how I’ve allowed myself so little memory of time and circumstance, I wonder if there is some other horror I might not remember. Can I believe any of these people capable of sins greater than my own? Who would I blame? Luke, barely sixteen? Terry, who may never fully have known of his role in the condemnation? A jealous mother or wife? The father, the family, the church, the Devil Himself, God?

For years there remained only one answer, and that answer was that the blame lay with me. I came to distrust no one more than myself, and the loathing I felt for any passion that threatened to rise in me—lust or love, joy or decided sadness,
anger, hate, hope—eventually honed itself into a dulled and protective sheath.

It was a covering I wore well: this new consciousness suited the life of a Christian. Kindness to others was no risk—I expected nothing in return. I found it easy to turn the other cheek when the slap itself produced no sting.

That night when I arrived home and took up my life like an old and familiar garment, I felt only an overwhelming relief. In this place I knew the boundaries, knew what I must do to be accepted and survive. I had learned my lesson: I could not run; I could never again believe I knew the world that well.

I woke the next morning to the sounds of my mother in the kitchen. Jumping up, I washed my face quickly, combed and tied my hair. When she turned from the stove I saw my own benumbed smile mirrored in her face. I felt a pinch of repulsion. “Let me,” I said, and took the spatula from her hand.

My father and brother came to a table set with matching plates and flatware, coffee and milk poured, syrup heated. We bowed our heads and I offered up thanks for food and family. My mother began to cry softly. “I’m just so happy that we’re all here together,” she said.

Shame filled me, a hot and sickening infusion. What had I done to these people, the ones who really loved me? Nothing in memory seemed enough to have warranted my hostile behavior. I looked back on that other girl and shivered with disgust. That girl was no longer me.

As we cleared the dishes my mother turned to me. “You know we cannot trust you yet. Only time will take care of that.”

I nodded in agreement and understanding. Of course. Why should they trust me? I had hurt them deeply, had nearly destroyed my family. I too would need time, enough to make clear to them how deeply that other daughter lay dead.

I was grounded, although it was not called such. Just as at the Langs’, I could not leave the house without a chaperone, kept inside as though even the air might contaminate my fragile resolve. I read the Bible and prayed. I made up songs of grace and salvation on the piano. I attended church with my family four times a week and felt the eyes of the elders upon me.

Confession through testimony let me speak of my worldly experiences with the freedom of a voyager. Even as my mother and father listened to their teenage daughter describe the shame and degradation of her past, their eyes held the pride I remembered from before, when I was young, in that other life.

When asked to testify, I did so, but what the people wanted most to hear, I soon realized, was not just the part where I was reborn, but rather the part that they knew must have come before. They wanted to hear the horrors of drugs and sex: the story of loneliness and loss that was mine was not enough.

I had never shot heroin, had never found myself in the middle of an orgy. Never had I prayed to Satan or cast the bones of cats in the light of a black candle. I sensed their disappointment, and even I felt cheated. Marijuana seemed trivial in comparison, the Annie Green Springs I’d drunk after school little more than lemonade. Why hadn’t more happened so that I could offer up even greater proof of my miraculous conversion?

The story I told became something outside of myself, something that had happened to that
other girl
. If my parents
remembered what I had told them on the way home from the Langs’, they never said, and without the reaffirmation of words to keep it alive, the summer became first an emptiness, a dark pause, and then the before and after of the story expanded until finally there was nothing left of that time in between to tell.

As I attempt to glean the telling moments of decision and awareness from the next four years of my life, from the time I entered ninth grade until I graduated with honors in 1976, I understand how difficult becomes the task of facing my own vulnerabilities and fears, resentments and regrets. And in seeing this I see also my inability to view even in retrospect that teenage girl as anyone innocent or without guile. Does some part of me still abide by that doctrine which insists that the child becomes responsible for the fate of her soul at the age of twelve?

Church filled every nook of my life. Instead of going to dances and movies, our youth group held dinners, put on skits, passed out tracts each Saturday and participated in church conferences all over the state. When revival came, I attended service each night. At camp meetings I searched out those my age who sat at the back, rigid with rebellion. I told them I knew what they were feeling, told them of my own dark times.

Among those followers of God who believed they saw the path my life must take was a quiet man who came to lead revival when I was sixteen. He was a stern but gentle speaker, not given to raucous condemnations or physical outbursts of praise. His dark suit and studied demeanor made him look more like a doctor than a preacher.

There was one night I had felt burdened, beset by some
melancholy I could not name. I had made my way to the altar and begun my prayers when he stopped in front of me and raised my chin.

“Daughter,” he said. “God is with you.” I nodded, and he continued. “You have a special calling. It is very strong. You will teach many.”

He moved his hand from my chin to my head. The gentleness of his touch made me want to cry. “Pray with me, sister,” he said, and I did, tilting my head back so he could cup it fully, feeling the balance of our weight between us. He spoke quietly, and the prayer he offered felt intimate, something only the two of us and our god need know.

“Dear Jesus, our sister stands before You to ask Your guidance in her life. We thank Thee, Lord, for the gift You have given, for the special ministry she will undertake. We pray she be given the faith and strength to accept Your will. In God’s name we pray. Amen.”

“Amen,” I whispered, once again feeling my life held out to me as though it were a rare and precious thing. Healer, leader—a child who carried with her the promise of miracles. I felt drained, unable to walk from that room into a life not of my own making. My path was clear, my choices clearer: I could hear and obey, I could turn away and lose not only my own soul, but the soul of all those I might have saved.

But this was at a time when I considered myself incapable of choice. The exhaustion I felt I believed stemmed from a spirit made meek in the face of its Creator. I knelt at the carpeted altar, crying, praying until I lay prone in front of the preacher, who would not leave me until my spirit’s thirst had been quenched.

It is often like this for those possessed of the Spirit: hours of speaking in tongues, singing and dancing, until finally your head lolls, your legs buckle. Later, you find yourself on the
floor, arms still raised, covered by coats and prayer cloths. You feel the sweetness of surrender. You feel taken, ravaged by the very air—every breath, every pore, every part of your being a gift, perfectly composed and consumed.

When school started in the fall of my ninth-grade year, my mother drove me across town each morning so that I wouldn’t have to attend my old junior high, where Patti and my other one-time friends still gathered at the corner to smoke. I was relieved not to have to deal with their scorn and pity. My new school had a reputation for being “clean,” populated with students more interested in football and cheerleading than mescaline and Janis Joplin. My new classmates had already heard of me, of my past and my sudden transformation. I was surprised to discover they thought I was a narc, a teenage undercover agent who had bartered her way out of juvenile detention by selling her soul to
them
—the priggish parents who saw pushers on every corner, the principal, the pigs.