Stained Glass Jesus
by Dori Ostermiller
My mother suffered a change of heart the day of her second wedding. I had heard about these things happening before, in Sabbath School. I had heard about Belief or Doubt swooping down like whimsical crows upon unsuspecting souls and changing them forever. I’d seen it happen at altar calls on Saturday mornings: suddenly a person’s face would get all glossy and pale and they’d stand up like it was a done thing, make their way firmly to the altar, faith singing on their sweaty features. They looked like people about to buy a new car, or claim a prize at a drawing. It had never happened to me this way. But my mother was always getting seized and tossed away by her faith, and we all suffered for it.
She didn’t tell me that she’d made a mistake, not right away. She endured quietly with the knowledge of her blunder all during her honeymoon in Carmel and through the relocation to our new house in northern California, and even after that. While the movers were hauling her black baby grand piano through the front door, unloading our sagging mattresses and box springs, dropping our boxes of linens on the dusty driveway, my mother suffered silently with her misbelief, trying to seem ecstatic about the whole thing, but I knew. I could tell by the way she stood apart from her new husband, hugging her tight elbows against her body. I could tell by the way she touched my sister Natalie’s angry forearm, tentatively, as if seeking absolution. I could tell by the way she fell silent at meals or around the card table, her face going ashen all of a sudden in the middle of the conversation. I knew what she was thinking. And I started to watch my new step-father closely--inspecting his moods, his wardrobe, his talk, to see if I could find the cause of my mother’s sudden deep repentance.
It was true that he was different. Gone was the jolly, flannel shirted, cowboy booted captor who had lured us away from my father, taking us on secret outings and promising horse farms in the country. Gone was the sly charmer who used to sneak over to our house on weekday mornings, bearing flowers and record albums and waltzing us around the living room. For two years, Mr. Robert had wooed us with his antics and his Broadway songs, his charcoal sketches and his big gentle hands--hands that didn’t strike out across the table or yank us by the hair. For two years he had been taking me on walks down quiet dirt lanes, sending secret letters full of promises, until finally, I had agreed with my mother that Mr. Robert was the future we wanted.
But in this new life, there were no songs or drawings or secret trips. In this new life, Mr. Robert left at seven each morning, wearing his uniform. It wasn’t really a uniform, but that’s what Natalie and I called his blue-grey suits and white shirts and red ties and grey socks. Sometimes there was a slight variation--the suit was all blue some days, or all grey, or grey with a blue pin-stripe, or blue with a grey weave. Sometimes the tie was more maroon than red, and often it had a bold pattern of bluish or greyish shapes marching down its shiny front, but always there was that reddish background, and those thin grey socks. The socks were exactly the same each day, and I began to suspect that he had a whole suitcase full of them, starchy and neat as new bills.
In this new life, Mr. Robert came home every evening at precisely 6:15, and he’d kiss my mother on the cheek, pat her on the ass, pour himself a martini and settle down in front of the TV, where he’d nest quietly until dinner. By this time, he would have removed certain parts of the uniform--the jacket and shoes and tie--and he’d have unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt, so that his grey and black chest hairs sprouted and curled around his empty buttonholes. He’d sit down on the brand new couch in the brand new family room, hitching his pants up on his thighs so that I could see the shiny, hairless skin of his calves beneath the blue-grey hems. I’d go in to him sometimes, sit down next to him--something I had rarely done with my own father, who held his privacy around him always like a smoky dangerous cape--and try to get him to talk to me, or to make myself interested in whatever he was watching.
"Hey Twerp," he’d always chirp, and not much more, and then he’d start changing the channels, cradling the remote control loosely in his bulky fingers. He’d jump from sports to weather to news to old black and white westerns and back to sports, never staying on anything long enough to get any story out of it, and soon I’d get discouraged and leave. Sometimes I wondered if he’d done this channel switching on purpose so that I’d let him alone--that once I was gone he’d congratulate himself silently, taking a deep sip of his drink, and settle snugly into watching one program all the way through.
In this new life, we played card games after dinner, or on weekends. Mr. Robert taught my mother and me to play hearts and black jack, and though we sometimes ended the game in a quarrel, I played with him anyway. There wasn’t much better to do during those hazy summer evenings; Natalie stayed in her room almost all the time now, wanting little to do with us, and I wasn’t in school yet, and had no one to talk to. I had left my few friends behind in Los Angeles, along with my favorite radio stations and my painting class and the long stretch of sidewalk in front of our old house where I used to ride my yellow skateboard before dusk. That had been the perfect sidewalk for skate boarding because it was wide and smooth and circled the block in a gentle series of undulations and dips, and the cracks in the cement were just fat enough to create a delicious pa-tat pa-tat pa-tat under my wheels.
Our new neighborhood had no sidewalks, and even if there had been some, the streets in our development were much too steep to skateboard on — streets that required my mother to shift into first gear and groan up the driveway on our way home from the grocery store or the post office or the bank. Besides, I had given my skateboard to my best friend Theresa when I left, imagining that I wouldn’t need it in our new neighborhood because I would have a horse, just as Mr. Robert had promised. I had imagined lush green valleys, too, intersected with streams and bordered by snow-covered mountains. I had imagined vast velvety fields dotted with the shiny bare backs of a dozen mares and foals. But the only horses I saw here were the ones people kept in tiny pen-like corrals angled up the dry hillsides next to their bare cedar decks. From highway 680, you could see a lot of these triangular corrals sandwiched between brand new tutors or ranch styles--houses so white and stark along the freeway, they seemed to me like fat naked hitchhikers, showing themselves blithely to every passing commuter.
The air was cleaner in Danville than it had been in Southern California, on that point I had to give Mr. Robert credit. And there were some dry golden hills behind our little house: if I hopped the back fence and picked my way up the artificial creek, between backyard gates and oval swimming pools, I could finally slip out of the development altogether. There I could wander for whole bright hours, if I wanted to, without smelling a car or hearing a mother’s call for her child or looking at my step-father’s jowly face. I could stretch my skinny legs and sing to the blue white heavens until lunch, if I wanted, without having to confront any real evidence of my mother’s and my mistake.
But the evidence continued to present itself: In this new life, Mr. Robert had real teenage children who often came over to sulk in the backyard or stand kicking at the driveway, nursing bent cigarettes, and an ex-wife who called our house in the middle of every night. I’d wake in my new room, which still smelled of cut nylon and fresh paint, to hear the phone ringing in the blackest hours of the morning, then Mr. Robert’s exasperated, dilatory voice saying, "Yes, Bee, I know you feel that way. How much have you had to drink, Bee? Where are the children? There’s no need for that kind of language. No, I’m going, Bee, goodbye." Then I’d hear my mother’s sleepy plaintive voice saying something I couldn’t make out, and soon the phone would ring again, and Mr. Robert would go through the whole thing two or three more times before unplugging the chord from the wall. After that, I’d sometimes hear my mother’s words become rushed and angry, like quiet sharp winds cutting through the darkened house, and once, I heard her gentle sobbing, accompanied by Mr. Robert’s tired, "There there, Elaine. I know it’s hard. There there."
I waited for her confession, but it didn’t come. She was quieter than usual as she went about completing the tasks her new home presented to her—sewing the curtains for the family room, ironing Mr. Robert’s starchy shirts, knitting Natalie an afghan to take to boarding school in the fall. She looked old to me all of a sudden; the grey half-moons below her eyes every bit as deep and bruisy as they’d been during the months after her separation from my father, the grooves around her mouth hardening and the line between her eyebrows setting. Sometimes I sat with her quietly or read to her while she sewed or cooked or practiced her putting on the living room carpet, but we couldn’t muster up much conversation, couldn’t come up with anything to cut through the dreary shame we both seemed to feel. We were going to make the best of it--that’s what she seemed to say to me in her weary glances, her long sighs. She ordered slip covers and bedspreads from the Spiegel catalog. She located the nearest Seventh Day Adventist church. She bought exercise videos planted things in the bare dry dirt of the new backyard.
Finally one Saturday morning, in the car on route to our new church, my mother looked at Natalie and me and said, "I’ve made a terrible mistake, girls. I’ve made an awful, terrible mistake." That was all she said. She looked back at the road before her then, dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a stained tissue, stopped at a red light, sighed heavily. Natalie said, "Oh, Jeez, this is too much," and turned her rigid face away for the rest of the car ride, staring out the window at the square white houses along the road. I didn’t know what to say, so I just touched my mother’s shoulder lightly, held her hand in my lap all through Sabbath School. And in the middle of the sermon that day, with my mother’s hand in mine, I decided that I would give myself to Jesus. What else could I do? He looked so generous and patient, so wise and sure standing up there in all his stained-glass glory behind the minister, a lamb tucked carefully under his solid manly arm. I would devote my whole self to the Lord and await that moment the preacher kept promising, when I would feel transported, carried away and cleansed and forgiven by His love. The preacher was talking about preparing for the second coming--that glorious event when Jesus would appear in the sky and take us up with him, carry us off absolved to his Father’s house in heaven and I thought yes, this is the answer, yes, and I squeezed my mother’s hand tightly. I didn’t know how long it would take, all this redemption, but I decided I would wait for it.
* * *
Then in July, the real trouble began. The heat suddenly bore down like a flat heavy hand over our heads. It was so hot, we couldn’t go outside barefoot without blistering the soles of our feet on the patio. They said it was a drought year--no rain since the previous November--and the hills behind our development began to crackle and buzz in the midday sun. Thistles baked and twisted between the cracks in the dusty concrete, and a congregation of lizards suddenly appeared in our backyard, spreading themselves like locust across the cedar deck. My stepfather said it was earthquake weather, and stayed home from work for a few days, lounging in his underwear and socks, a martini in hand.
"It’s fire weather," my mother said. "These hills are going to go up like so much gasoline. I just know it."
"It’s fucking stay inside where there’s air conditioning weather," said Natalie, and retreated to her room to read, knowing she could get away with anything now.
"It’s the end of the world," said my tiny dry grandmother, who I’d been seeing every other week since we moved north. "Jesus is coming," she said. "That’s the reason for all this heat."
I liked this last explanation the best. I liked the idea of Christ being ushered in by the bright, catastrophic heat, his presence breaking the cruel background of sky, a fury of storm clouds following on his heels, raining salt tears over the parched land. I liked this idea, and so I started to picture it in my mind, to prepare myself for it, to sanctify myself in the heat.
"You’ll get a third degree burn laying out on the deck in this weather," my mother scolded. "Get inside," she demanded.
"I’m purifying myself," I said. And I was. I wanted to bake every wicked longing from my body, to burn the sin from my very fibers. I also wanted to be tan, and as thin as I could possibly be without dying, so I started keeping track of every atom I ate, writing down each bite in a green spiral notebook. This way, a small part of the world, at least, could be contained. I wrote, "One slice wheat toast with teaspoon p-nut butter and half a pickle. Half an apple and two slices of cheese. Three Oreos and a Diet Pepsi. Avocado with salt."
The thermometer on our back door crept up to 96 degrees, 98, 101, 103 degrees. My stepfather walked around the house in his boxer shorts holding his drinks and sometimes I could see his penis through the gaping fly as he walked. It looked hairy and crinkled and red and I couldn’t turn my head away, as much as I willed myself to. I wanted Jesus to come soon. I knew it could happen if I thought about it hard enough, long enough. Instead, fires started cropping up in the hills. Two fires, then three, then four fires raged out of control under the blank tearless sky, circling Mt. Diablo’s bald crown like a ring of bright orange and black hair. My mother and I could feel the heat from the fires when we stepped outside onto the driveway, even though they were still several miles away. If we stood there for more than a few minutes, bits of ash would begin floating down and sticking to our sweaty bare skin, our arms. My mother’s face was black with it.
"Isn’t fire one of the last plagues?" I asked her hopefully. "Isn’t that one of the things in Revelation? One of the big things before Jesus comes?"
"I don’t remember, Angel," she said tiredly, wiping the soot from her cheeks. "Let’s go inside and make something cold to drink."
We waited for notice to evacuate, but it never came, so life continued as the fires raged on, becoming an ominous but familiar part of the landscape. My mother took us shopping for school clothes in Walnut Creek and we wandered sleepily through the cool department stores, picking up blouses and tee shirts and dresses. We’d emerge from these shopping sprees feeling drugged and parched on cool air, staggering with our bags into the heat like travelers coming home after a long journey. Then we’d remember, and glance anxiously to the foothills, to see if the fires had eaten our neighborhood yet. They hadn’t.
Finally they died down, leaving massive squares of black on the scarred hillsides, and the smoke filtered through the sky, turning it milky brown, and it was in this sooty aftermath that Lisa, Mr. Robert’s 19-year-old daughter, came to our house one day, her face streaked with mascara, her hair reeking of cigarettes, to tell us that her mother, Mr. Robert’s ex-wife, had finally drunk herself to death.
"She’s dead, daddy," she kept sobbing, while Mr. Robert patted her back feebly, while Elaine and Nat and I stood helplessly aside. "She killed herself," Lisa sniffed, "And now we have nowhere to go. Me and Tommy have nowhere to go."
"Well, of course you do," he said, looking over Lisa’s heaving shoulder at Elaine. "You’ll come stay with us, that’s all. We’ll just have to get a bigger house, won’t we, Elaine? We’ll just have to figure it out." My mother said nothing, just hugged her elbows, bracing herself, I guessed, for the penalties of this new life.
* * *
We were playing cards at the shiny oak table in the family room, the night I realized the magnitude of our mistake . My mother and Mr. Robert and I were playing "Shark," a game I had learned from my father and taught to Elaine and Robert. Natalie was in her room, as usual; I could hear muffled screeches of her Led Zeppelin album floating down the hallway, and I pictured her stacking her clothes and books and records, with angry precision, into cardboard boxes. In a week or two, she would go away to Monterey Adventist Academy, and she was packing up early. She opened her bedroom door for a moment and "Stairway to Heaven" came skittering out like a crazed animal released.
"Natalie--if you insist on playing that music, you can at least turn down the volume," Elaine called, and instantly, the door slammed shut with a crack and thud. Mr. Robert made a comment under his breath.
"What’s that dear?" my mother asked.
"Nothing. Nothing at all, Elaine."
"I heard you say something--"
"It’s nothing. Just play why don’t you--are you going to take all night to draw that damned card?"
My mother rolled her eyes and sighed, then drew another card from the pot. "Your turn, honey," she said to me. I drew a card, discarded another, then glanced at my hand--it was perfect, a winning hand: I had saved my jacks and nines, just as my father had taught me to do. I waited for the right moment, watched their faces, then placed my hand on the table.
"Shark," I said triumphantly. "I win."
"Sure you do," Mr. Robert said, with a grimace. "I’d win too, if I cheated as well as you do, twerp." He drummed his fingers twice on the table-top, still studying his cards with suspicious eyes. His forehead was glittering with perspiration and I could see the yellowed sweat stains under the arm-holes of his white undershirt.
"What are you talking about? You think I cheated?" I went hot and itchy from my collar bones to my eyebrows, even though I knew I hadn’t cheated. I was a good player, that was all. Mr. Robert had never really understood the game, even though I kept telling him how to win. " I played fair," I said, indignant.
"She didn’t cheat, honey. I was watching her play," Elaine touched his arm and he jerked it away.
"Don’t baby her so much, Elaine. I saw her take two cards on a draw and put one back after she looked at them. Whatever--it doesn’t matter; it’s just a goddamned game, isn’t it, little twerp?"
"I didn’t cheat!" I said, standing up, feeling a pounding in my palms.
"Sure you didn’t, sweetie," he said with a cold, lopsided grin. "And I’m not bald, either. Really, I just shave my head--keeps the lice away." He stood up, slapping his cards down on the table and laughed hollowly. "I’d rather go watch that idiot Carter on NBC than play this lousy game. Good evening to you, ladies." He walked from the room, adjusting the fly on his boxer shorts as he went.
"Don’t worry Angel," my mother said tiredly. "He didn’t mean it." I couldn’t look at her. I just stood there silently, my winning hand spread in front of me like a sour joke, my fingers heavy at my sides. "He’s just being a baby because he lost, that’s all, honey. Men are all the same. All the same all the same all the same," she sighed, got up from the table, gathered the popcorn bowls, the dirty glasses and crumpled napkins.
"But I didn’t cheat," I said, and my voice sounded pathetic to me--a thin ribbon of blue floating down through the room’s hot heavy air.
"I know, honey. I know. But it is just a game, after all, and we’re all under a lot of pressure these days." She walked into the kitchen with an armful of dirty things, looking broken, I thought. Looking defeated. I felt the tears welling up in my throat and I wanted to go to her, to put my arms around her and bury my face in her blouse. But I knew she was too far away now.
I stood there for a second, like a planet that has lost its orbit, then marched down the hallway to Natalie’s room. I threw open the door; the green floor was covered with boxes half-filled with her things--tee-shirts and sweaters perfectly folded in slim stacks, albums alphabetically organized, stacks of shiny books. She had even packed her underwear in shoe boxes--they looked like little flowered sandwiches nesting in their rectangular containers. I thought I might explode.
"Quit gaping and shut the door, if you want to come in, weirdly." I obeyed, then ran across the room and threw myself onto her bed, hiding my face in her rough quilt. Natalie turned off her stereo, came and sat next to me, rubbing my back awkwardly as I sobbed.
"What’s going on, Sylvie?" she asked. "You wanna talk about it?" All of a sudden, her voice sounded so deep and sure--the voice of a grown up, rather than the bouncy, slightly off key voice of my teenage sister. I looked up at her through bleary eyes, saw that her face was different, too, leaner and sharper, with two tiny lines radiating from the corner of each green eye. She had the full, voluptuous body of a woman now, and I didn’t know what to say to her. How could I say anything? How could I convince her not to go away, not to disappear into the world of sports and algebra and dorm parties? She was probably happy to be going. I felt dizzy with loss.
"I miss dad," I found myself blurting through my tears. Natalie looked away, and I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing. She closed her eyes and shook her head, and I braced myself for her angry words. Then she smiled wryly and her hand dropped to my arm.
"Why not call him?" she asked. "Let’s just call and tell him that we miss him, then, ok?"
"I don’t know what to say," I sniffed.
"Just tell him you miss him, you goof. That’s enough. Just say hi and see what he’s up to--I mean, God, Sylvie. He is still your father." I watched her as she grabbed the phone, dialed the number by heart. I wondered how many times she had dialed that number late at night, while the rest of us were watching TV or playing cards in the other room. Had she been talking to him all along, without me? She handed me the blue phone and I took it awkwardly, nearly repulsed. I fit it to my ear, heard it ringing once, twice, three times. Then his voice--"Hello--Dr. Sandon here"— pinched and impatient as always, as if he were talking hurriedly through his nose, on the way to his next task.
"Dad?"
"Natalie? How’s my girl?"
"No. It’s Sylvie, dad. It’s me."
"Sylvia." His voice dropped down slightly, like a ball on its second bounce. "What a surprise. What’s up hon?" he said after a minute or two. "How’s my sporto? Sylvie?" But I couldn’t answer because I was crying hard now, my mouth open stupidly, tears and snot streaming down my face. "What’s the mater, hon?" he asked, but I just held onto the phone and sobbed, silent except for the occasional sharp sound of my breath. Finally, Nat grabbed the phone away, told him I was upset, that we missed him, that we just wanted to say we missed him, that we would call again soon. Then she hung up.
"You nit wit," she said, putting her arm around my neck and pulling me into her. "Why didn’t you say anything to him? He’s going to think you don’t like him anymore." Then she pushed me away gently, turned her stereo back on and continued to pack her things neatly into boxes. I stayed for a while, watching her, wiping my nose, trying to figure out what I would have said to my father, if I could have said something. After a minute, I realized with a start that I didn’t have anything to say. He was our father, that was all. Whatever else he had been or done, he was the only father we had.
* * *
Within a few weeks, Natalie was gone and the rest of us had left the bright new tract house in Danville for an ugly barn like structure perched in the foothills one development over. This second house had two stories and five bedrooms, and still smelled of the previous owners’ cigarette smoke. This new town was called Alamo, and as we moved our things out of the U-haul, once again lugging boxes and chair cushions through doorways and up stairs, I kept thinking of the famous Texas battle, the parched muddy soldiers hiding out in ditches, bodies strewn about the dry earth. "Isn’t the Alamo where everybody got killed?" I asked Mr. Robert as he helped Lisa carry her bed into a downstairs room. "Isn’t that where everybody got slaughtered?" I asked.
"Yes, but they held out for a good long time before it was over," he said, as he dropped the mattress on the floor with a thud. "Where do you want this thing, Lisa?"
Lisa shrugged and pointed to the darkest corner of the room. We would be neighbors now, she and I, inhabiting adjacent rooms in the dim, cool cellar of this musty old house, our exhausted, newlywed parents in the room above us. Lisa would share a bathroom with me, and a hall closet and a phone jack, so I watched her closely. She was quiet, and plump, and spoke as if she was afraid someone might overhear her, sometimes covering her lips with her fingers. She kept looking at us over her shoulder, then turning away when anyone caught her eye or addressed her. During the move that day, I decided that I liked her, even though she was painfully shy and acted much younger than her 19 years. Unlike Tommy, who was Natalie’s age, Lisa seemed to understand that humor was needed; she kept surprising all of us by occasional, well timed witticisms, spoken from behind her pink hand, while her brother stormed through the new house looking stoned and furious, glaring with bloodshot eyes, kicking over lamps and shoving at boxes, tossing his few things haphazardly into the tiny paneled room downstairs that he’d chosen for his own. I didn’t blame him for being upset, but I hated him for taking it out on the rest of us. Once, when I tried to make friends by carrying a box of record albums into his room, he accosted me on the steps, grabbed the box from my arms and brushed by me, pushing me into the wall. Then he turned around and peered up at me in the darkened stairwell.
"Keep your hands off my stuff, understand?" he said in his quiet, cigarette gnarled voice. "The sooner you get that, the better off you’ll be." I could smell the alcohol on his breath then, and I backed away. He was already losing his hair in the front. "You got that, Saliva, or whatever the fuck your name is?"
After that, I stayed out of Tommy’s way. It wasn’t hard to do, since he was usually locked in his bedroom, talking on the phone or listening to Aerosmith. He had his own phone line, his own television, his own bathroom, while Lisa and I had to share all of those things between us. I wondered how long it would take Elaine to figure out that Tommy was staying home all day and smoking pot in his room. The sultry, pungent scent seeped into the hallway no matter how many towels he stuffed under the crack in his door; but we three teenagers lived in the dark basement of the house, and seemed far away from our parents, who were usually gone now anyway. Mr. Robert was working later hours all of a sudden, and my mother had taken up golf and yoga, was singing in the choir, and had joined half a dozen committees at our new church. I knew what she was up to, and I often asked if I could go with her to the ugly brick building in Pleasant Hill. While she practiced choral arrangements or sat in tedious church meetings, I wandered around the grounds, the playing fields out back, the tiny, dilapidated classrooms of Pleasant Hill Junior Academy, where I would be starting eighth grade, in a week or two.
I felt a strange fascination and revulsion toward everything at that school, that church, but I was especially obsessed with the huge stained glass picture of Jesus in the main sanctuary, and I would always find myself wandering down the middle aisle, sitting alone in the empty front pew and staring up, up, at the massive kind face of the Savior. He looked benign enough, I thought, although there was a certain emotion missing from his expression--a certain compassion or pain. I knew that this wasn’t the bloody, tortured Jesus of the crucifixion, which I’d seen in our old church in Tustin. This was the post crucifixion Jesus, serene and safe in his father’s kingdom at last. This one had been through it all already, and had the mellow, self-satisfied look of one assured of his immortality. He looked like a rugged, good-natured hippy, with his gauzy robes and long sun streaked hair, and I wondered if he could see me through those stained-glass eyes. I wondered if he could hear me, when I prayed to him late at night after my mother had left my room.
Since we’d been in the second house, Elaine had gotten in the habit of coming to my room each evening, standing in my doorway, asking to come in. She said she just wanted to tuck me in, but once she had shut the door behind her and was sitting on the edge of the bed, she would start to cry.
"I don’t know what to do," she’d cry, holding my hand in her cold fingers, trying to check her tears. "I don’t know where to turn," she’d say and I’d nod and listen, straining my mind for the right questions, trying for an expression that would help her out of her pain. She would talk softly then, seeming to find some relief in my listening, about her aversion to Mr. Robert’s children, her hatred of this new house, her deep regret and unhappiness. She would tell me about Mr. Robert’s impatient appetites, his rough handling of her, her own inability to enjoy their sex. She would talk about leaving, finding a place somewhere near her parents’ house, just the two of us, but always she would come back around, resolving to stick it out, to suffer through it, to make the best of the choice we had made.
"I couldn’t bear the shame of another divorce, don’t you see, angel?" she blurted one night. She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes, stared at the ceiling, breathing deeply. I winced, felt the sudden horrible urge to slap her. Instead, I chewed my own thumbnail fiercely and forced my heart to retreat inward, to curl up inside itself like a prodded caterpillar.
"But I shouldn’t be telling you these things, Angel," my mother finally said, smiling apologetically, composing her features carefully again. "I guess I just don’t know who else to talk to."
"Tell your troubles to the Lord, mom," I said icily, willing her to leave now, to let me escape into my world of dreams.
Once she was gone, I turned off the light, cupped myself into a ball deep inside my bed and prayed, my eyes wide open in the pitch-black under the heavy covers. I prayed, asking Jesus to get down here as soon as he could, to waste no more time, to prepare me for his coming.
I wanted to be ready; that was all I could think of to ask and I asked for it nightly, fearing, most of all, that I would be deficient, shocked and unready at the glorious sight of him. My unreadiness filled my dreams at night, turning them to nightmares; Jesus was coming and I was at a rock concert on a Saturday morning, or sitting in a dark theater watching a smutty movie, my hand between my legs, and I would look up in horror at the tumultuous bright sky, his angry face shining down judgment and death. When I woke from these dreams, I could never go back to sleep and so I’d wander the new house in the cool dawn, taking in the strange smells, the odd bulky shapes, the eerie feeling of dreams being dreamt so near me--strangers’ dreams.
The shiny nosed preacher at our new church fed my fears, confirming the probability that Jesus would come when we all least expected it. "He will come like a thief in the night," the preacher said, grimacing, "and all but the most devout and watchful will be surprised at his coming. Two of you will be sitting side by side, and only one will be taken. The other will be left. A family will be working side by side in the yard, and only one will be taken. The others will avert their eyes in shame..." I would sit in the second pew from the front with my mother each Saturday, listening to this talk about the second coming, watching the preacher’s thick bottom lip pop in and out of his mouth.
"Jesus will appear glorious in the eastern sky like a cloud approaching the earth," the preacher insisted, "and all but the most virtuous will turn their faces away in terror and shame, begging the rocks, the very earth itself to fall down upon them, to cover their utter wickedness. But the righteous," he said, opening his thick arms to include those of us in the first few rows. "The righteous, the watchful, the faithful few who have prepared for his coming will feel only joy when they see the signs in the eastern sky. They will look to the heavens and rejoice and be taken up by the strength, by the conviction, by the utter certainty of their faith..."
I started to watch and wait. After church on Saturdays, my mother and I would drive to my grandparents’ home in the hills, and while my mother and grandmother prepared lunch, talking quietly in the cool dark kitchen, while my grandfather watched sports on TV, or paced in his garden, I’d stand alone on the edge of their wide circular front lawn, staring at the eastern sky. I would stand there for hours, some days, trying to picture Christ’s coming, trying to muster up the appropriate feelings of joy and certainty. I would gaze out into the great arc of blue over Mt. Diablo, where I knew Jesus lived, and pick a cloud on the horizon--maybe that small one over there, or that dark fisted one hovering above Alamo. Yes, that could be it, I told myself. I wanted to see it, that cloud, his face, his hands reaching toward me from above, his perfect, paternal smile. But whenever I came close to imagining it, I felt only uncertainty, and terror. I couldn’t muster up the appropriate feeling of glad confidence. I couldn’t arouse any real faith. I felt only wicked and scared, standing there in my expectation, my unbearable desire. I was small and full of lust, and I knew that Jesus would see right through my devout surface, when he came, that he would pass by me as if I were no more than a sooty stain on the otherwise perfect lawn.
"What are you doing out there?" my mother would finally call. "Why don’t you come in and eat?" she’d ask, and I’d go, lured from my vigil by the smells of meat loaf and onions and the comfort of the television. I was weak, after all, and fleshy, and unfit for redemption.
School started, and I went to Bible class every morning in one of the tiny, dingy classrooms at Pleasant Hill Junior Academy, and I listened to the teacher, Mr. Marks, talk about the joys of baptism by immersion. I had seen this before a few times--the robed believers coming up dripping from the water, cradled in the preacher’s arms, joy and pride shining on their wet faces. Walking to the girls’ bathroom after class one day, clutching my bible to my chest, I decided I would be baptized. I knew that only baptism would heal me of my doubt, that it would fill me with the certainty I needed for my watch. I imagined myself emerging from the baptismal cleansed and holy, the doubt and fear falling away from me like a dirty smudge.
My mother was pleased with my decision, and took me for weekly counseling sessions with Pastor Lange, who warned me of the dangers of adolescence, which I would no doubt be facing soon. "The temptation of the flesh is strong," he would say, sucking his lower lip into his mouth, massaging his right knee with his pink hand. "But you must resist, and study your New Testament, and keep yourself holy in the eyes of God, no matter what your peers are urging you to do. Are they urging you?" he asked a little too eagerly. I told him he had nothing to worry about, that my sins had nothing to do with people my own age. And it was true: I stayed apart from the other kids at the school, some of whom, I already knew, were smoking pot or drinking, going out to movies on Friday nights, making out in the empty church classrooms during lunches. I stayed away from them all, reading my Bible during recess and after school while I waited for Elaine to pick me up. On the way home, in the car, I’d quote whole passages aloud that I’d memorized--The Beatitudes, The Lord’s Prayer, The Ten Commandments, The 23rd Psalm.
"Tommy was arrested for drunk driving last night," Elaine told me on the way home from school. "Which means, of course, that he can’t drive his own car now, and we’ll have to pay a stiff fine, and Robert and I have to take him everywhere." She was bristling, her face set and angry, her thin fingers gripping the steering wheel tightly. "I’m sorry, mom," I offered "But we shouldn’t judge him. Jesus says in the New Testament that--"
"I know, Sylvie. I know, angel. It’s just hard, you know? This is so hard. If I’d known things were going to turn out this way..." She sighed.
"Everything will work out for the best, if you give it to the Lord," I said. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
"Ok, ok. I suppose you’re right. I suppose that’s from the Psalms or something, isn’t it?"
"Luke 12:31," I said, and turned my face away in disgust.
I imagined, in those first few weeks of the fall semester, that being baptized would stuff me so full of faith and love, I would even be able to love Mr. Robert’s son, who sneered at me across the dinner table before he stormed off to his room again, or Lisa, who ate potato chips and twinkies listlessly in front of the TV each evening. I would even feel tenderness again toward Mr. Robert, who had stopped speaking to me entirely, since our move, and only grunted and patted my bottom or the top of my head when we ran into each other in the hallways. The baptism, I imagined, would take away the revulsion that I felt toward my new family. It would make me whole, mend this terrible ache between the two halves of my ribcage—some days, it was as if God himself had slid a silver knife into my breast, cutting me in two. Baptism would fix all that, I knew. I imagined that everything would be brighter, after I emerged, louder, more sensual, that I would gasp with wonder and gratitude, like Dorothy coming out of her dingy beaten house and stepping into the bright landscape of Oz.
Instead, I came out of the baptismal coughing, having gotten some of the sour, chlorine rich water up my nose and down my throat. Pastor Lange nearly slipped as he brought me to my feet and we stood clutching each other, waist deep in the cold water, his robes heavy and slick. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was not God’s face, but Pastor Lange’s thick black nostril hairs and wide red chin, and afterward, when we had left the baptismal and I was changing into my church clothes in the back room, he barged in and stood in the doorway for a moment, staring blankly at my goose pimpled body, his face working itself into an explanation, his fingers curling and uncurling at his sides. Feeling strangely unsurprised, I covered myself as well as I could with my arms and hands, turned my face away from him until he left, muttering apologies.
I shivered all through the service that day, my hair damp and cold on the back of my neck. I could hardly look at Pastor Lange’s shiny fat face as he spoke, or at the stained glass Jesus looming behind him, and on the way home, I was completely silent while my mother talked about how proud she was, how grown up and pretty I’d looked, how she had almost cried watching me. "You looked like such a little lady," she kept saying, shaking her head. "You looked so grown-up all of a sudden."
The next week, I got an ear infection and a cold and decided to stop thinking so much about the second coming. I felt like a bride who, after having prepared herself for months, discovers only shock and humiliation in the arms of her new beloved, his belly heavy and slack over her, his breath sour in her ear. And I understood, finally, something about why my mother came to my room each night, beaten down and desperate, and tried to talk to me, to hold me. After my baptism, I was finally able to hold her back, to open myself to the full force of her sorrow, rocking with her on the edge of my bed that dreary October.
Dori Ostermiller's fiction and poetry have appeared in The Bellingham Review, Calliope, Peregrine, and Alligator Juniper, among others. She recently received a Massachussetts Cultural Council Artist's Fellowhip in support of her work. She lives in Northampton, where she is at work on a novel.
Please post a message on our community bulletin board, or send email to editor@serpentinia.com to let us know what you think about this story, and we'll pass your message along to the author.
Home || Current Issue || Prior Issues || Writing Contest || Staff || Links || Rings
© 2001 Serpentine. All rights reserved.
