How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  The Internet finally connected. Once online, Suzette checked her Hotmail account, and then we visited this New Agey website based in California and took several personality quizzes. We discovered through a series of multiple-choice questions that if I were a movie from the 1980s, I’d be Dirty Dancing; Suzette would be Working Girl. If I were a color, I’d be blue, and she would be yellow, which she claimed was racist. I asked how, since the quiz never asked about race, but she said they must have known anyhow and clicked off the page. Then she got that smirk on her face, the same one she’d had at Ginger’s wedding reception and would always get right before she showed me a new collection of celebrity nudes. She made sure the volume was off and typed in a URL. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at, but once I realized, I jumped back from the computer screen. Suzette cackled. Eventually, the camera pulled back to show a couple having sex on a barber’s chair, the woman sitting atop the man, her large breasts shaking back and forth.

  “She has big ones,” Suzette said. The movie had paused because it was only thirty seconds long. The couple was frozen midfuck. “Like Dolly, jackass,” Suzette added. The woman’s hair was peroxided and big, but the comparisons to Dolly ended there. The man had a ponytail and a smooth torso, his penis shiny and fat. The website claimed to show full-length videos for a monthly fee. “Oh, yeah,” I said, and she hit the replay button. For thirty seconds more, we watched the man bury himself again inside the woman, and this time Suzette turned up the volume. I had expected the cheesy music, the exaggerated moans—but not the sound of flesh on flesh, the squishy slap of two bodies being thrown together. “Are you sure this feels good?” I asked. Instead of answering me, Suzette leaned in to put her mouth on mine. And at first it was nice. The warm taste of another’s tongue on my tongue exploring my mouth. I closed my eyes and let the kiss do its magic on me. I half hoped it would be enough to change me, this kiss, to wake up some inner boy inside me who had been asleep all along and waiting for this moment to come alive. The Rooster my father wanted so badly for me to be, the one who liked girls the way Derrick and Henry liked them. But the kiss only stirred up the old lust of mine, and I imagined not Suzette’s mouth but the Holy Warrior’s, his hairy face pressed to mine.

  Eventually I pushed her off and went over to the couch. Through the walls came sounds from the kitchen, the clanging of pans and the loud erratic yells of Mrs. Jin to the employees. Suzette sat in the rolling chair, eyeing me, her hair all mussed about her face. Then she got up and rummaged through the little closet until she found a wig. “I bought this for my Marilyn,” she said, and put it on. “Can I kiss you again?” She moved closer. Her face had lost its smirk. Her face showed me something more personal, something more dangerous: the look of desire. I had this idea that she wasn’t even seeing me anymore—to her, I’d become just a body she could pretend was Derrick, the same way I’d done with her when we’d kissed. I said, “Suzette, please—we’re friends.”

  She took off her blouse, then her undershirt. Her bra was the same warm beige as her skin. “Is it because I’m too small?” she said, cupping her chest and coming forward. “No—please.” I put my knees to my chest, but she kept coming. It was like we were playing a game, a very adult version of Simon Says or Red Light/Green Light, only I didn’t know any of the rules. “Is it because I’m Chinese?” She stood over me, her legs pressing into the couch cushion. She took off the wig and leaned in as if she were about to kiss me again. “Is it because I’m a girl?” Her eyes were dark and wet.

  “No,” I said. “I’m saved now.” I went into this long spiel about last night. My baptism, the call—everything. At some point she sank to the floor, and there was only my voice, and then not even that because I had run out of things to say. We sat in silence, not looking at each other, the smell of grease and fried meat wafting into the little office.

  “Oh, God,” she said, almost like a prayer. “Oh, God, oh, God.” She dragged her fingers across her scalp, then said, “I hate this place so much.” I slid to the floor and tried to hug her, but she shook me off. “You will hate it, too—when you get older, when people start to figure out what you are.” Her voice had turned hard again—something like Gene Tierney’s in Leave Her to Heaven. She stood and tossed the wig back in the closet. “Most people probably already know a little bit. I did. Probably even dumb Henry knows.” She pulled her undershirt and blouse back on. She fixed her hair. “Did your mother know?” She was smirking again. Only I knew her now. This ice-bitch routine was just bluster. A defense. She only acted this way when she was truly hurt. Still, my stomach felt like a foot was kicking it from the inside, and I wanted to hurt her more.

  “Suzette,” I said. “I’m worried about your soul.”

  She breathed in. “Get out.”

  “I think we should pray.” I was talking crazy. We both knew it, but I kept going. “It’s not too late for you.”

  “Get out!” She threw a couch pillow at me, and I was crawling on the floor toward the door. I was crying and crawling, and she was screaming and throwing. I wasn’t fast enough for her. She rushed me, grabbing me by my shirt’s collar, and pushed me out, slamming the door behind me, locking it. I tried knocking, but nothing. Not a sound. Like she’d ceased to exist once I no longer saw her. “Suzette, I’ll pray for you,” I said, my voice so small I doubted if she heard it. Up front, Henry had finished carving the pumpkin, and it sat on the counter by the cash register. He’d gone traditional with the nose and eyes, making them triangular, but the mouth had been sawed into a sneer, not a smile, with jagged teeth. He’d placed a candle inside, and the thing flickered with light. Henry still sat at the same table, but this time he was joined by Ginger and the baby. Ginger smiled when I came through. “How’s your daddy doing?” she asked, and I told her he was fine. I knew she was enrolled in night classes and hoped to start nursing school in the spring. But I didn’t ask about any of that. I was ready for home, for silence. As I pushed the door open to leave, Henry asked what I thought of the pumpkin. I told him it looked like something the devil made. “Like from hell itself,” I said. Thinking that this was a compliment, he smiled big. “Cool,” he told me as I barged into the night.

  —

  Not long after Halloween, my father called a special meeting with the deacons. He wouldn’t let me sit in the sanctuary to listen to them—he expected fireworks—but the walls of Second Baptist were so thin that if I pressed my ear against the back wall of his office I could hear most everything the men were saying. Once he had them all together, he got right to the point: He proposed a plan for building a baptistery. “I’ve been inspired,” he told them, “from an event I went to the other night.” He didn’t go into detail—maybe the Holy Warriors embarrassed him—he only said that it was something the church needed. “We should grow,” he said, “if we are going to survive.” It was voted down, naturally. The deacons thought the idea extravagant. “Especially,” said Hubert Dickerson, Becky’s father, “since First Baptist has a perfectly good one we can use.”

  At the next Sunday service, my father surprised the congregation by carrying a sledgehammer into the sanctuary. He stood behind the pulpit, clutching it, and said, “Dearly beloved, we need a new start.” He lifted the hammer above his head and swung it into the drywall behind him. Flecks of wood and plaster flew out into the pews, and several deacons stood up. I was sitting in the back, and almost screeched, “No, Daddy!” when he swung again, heaving the hammer into the wall another time, then another, until a hole had been knocked clean through it. An old widower sitting up front was so excited by the commotion that he passed out, slumping and sliding out of his pew, only to be revived later and claim it was the best service he’d ever been to.

  The deacons, however, were unimpressed. They convened again in another special meeting with my father in the sanctuary after church—this time no one seemed to notice my presence in back, listening to them harangue my father. The large hole in the wall loom
ed over the men like an angry mouth. They were divided on how to handle this latest incident. Hubert Dickerson, as he had before, wanted my father’s immediate resignation. “The church house,” he said, “is no place for stunts.” But Jim Musclewhite, the father of Henry Musclewhite, came to my father’s defense. He claimed my father should be allowed to shepherd them however he saw fit. “And,” he added, “the congregation seemed to really respond to it.” Perhaps wanting to repay my father for his officiating his son’s marriage to Ginger, Mr. Musclewhite moved that they go ahead and build the baptistery, and I couldn’t tell who was more shocked by the motion passing—my father or Hubert Dickerson.

  —

  All through Halloween and on into rainy November, Suzette and I didn’t speak. I never got up the nerve to call her or even walk by the China Belle to chance running into her. Her talk of my being gay had frightened me off. I worried that what she had said was not only true, but settled. That I had made a choice about who I was without really knowing I was choosing. Meanwhile, my father had expanded his ministry, pushing beyond the Delta, spending all day out on the road, leaving me behind occasionally to do my schoolwork and chores. When home, he was at the church checking on the construction of the baptistery, which was going slowly. And so I was often left alone—really alone—for the first time since the passing of my mother, and I noticed her absence more than ever. After the funeral, we’d held on to most of her belongings, and now I returned to them, rooting out the tiara from the kitchen cabinet and her half-empty bottle of Clinique from her drawer in the bathroom. I sprayed the air with the perfume then capered through the mist, the tiara clutched to my head. I felt close to her again like this, her smell all around me, her voice ringing through my head, telling me about the Neck. I spent whole mornings writing down passages of what I remembered from those stories: the women and the bootleggers and the lost mother. Then I moved on to writing about my mother: all I remembered about how she looked and the way she said things and the meals she fixed. I got behind in my lessons and sometimes was so focused on writing about her that I’d forget I was wearing the tiara and only just remember when I heard my father’s Chevy pulling into the driveway.

  When not writing, I fantasized about the Holy Warrior in the baptistery: his dark eyes like little pools of black ink, the scrape of his hands on my skin. A week after my baptism, I was paging through my childhood picture Bible (something I’d begun to do to refocus my thoughts away from the untoward) when I stopped on a familiar drawing of John the Baptist. Wearing a lambskin thong, he was leading Jesus into the River Jordan. The sketch included the sinewy curves of his muscles, highlighting the result of a life lived in the wild. His eyes were not on Jesus but looking off the page, looking directly at me. I shut the book and threw it across the room.

  Sometimes my thoughts were like a fever that never broke. Even in dreams, I wasn’t safe. A dark figure haunted them—the amalgamation of the Holy Warrior and the John the Baptist picture. He slipped from the shadows at the foot of my bed and slid under my covers. His body pressed into mine, dead crickets falling from his hair, his mouth whispering nonsense. I grabbed at his face, his neck, pushing him off, but invariably pulling him closer. He put his hands under my back and—it always led to this, the dream—he flipped me onto my stomach. He fell onto me again and again, and I always feared I’d shatter into a million pieces before waking up, like always, with my penis throbbing into the mattress.

  Masturbation provided only temporary relief. Six hours later, and I’d catch myself eyeing the picture Bible again, or remembering the couple fucking on Suzette’s computer, or the sound of the Holy Warrior calling out my name. Guilt came and went, always waning as the desire grew. As fall turned into winter, and my loneliness persisted, my body began to change, and with this new body came a new geography of sensation. In the long, empty days I was alone, I touched myself all over. My chest, my arms, my belly, my balls. I couldn’t help it. Once, I alighted by accident onto the tender knot of my anus, pushing one finger, then another, into the puckered lip until I went far enough inside to make contact with the deepest part of myself. Racked with pleasure so sharp and sudden, I blacked out. Later I’d wonder if other people—grown-ups who had jobs and lived in the world—knew such a thing on the body existed. If they did, how were they able to do anything else but this? When I did it again, and again, I began to believe I was touching something more ephemeral than an organ, the very essence of my existence, that part of a person you call a soul.

  —

  By Easter, construction on the baptistery hit a delay.

  The builders discovered they couldn’t run a water line into that part of the sanctuary because of an outdated building code. My father was livid and spent many mornings down at the courthouse poring over old documents with a town councilman to find a solution. Spring had come, as it always had, with the white flowers on the dogwoods beside the church popping open, and one morning, while he was at the courthouse, I walked down to Second Baptist. The church seemed holier when no one else was around. After picking a few of the dogwood blooms, I went inside the sanctuary to see the progress of the baptistery for myself. The door was left unlocked because of all the traffic from the construction workers, and the inside smelled warm and soapy, like Pine-Sol and clean laundry. Every week a woman from Hawshaw polished the pews and vacuumed the carpet, and it appeared she had just been there. Everything shined. I sat on the back pew for several minutes twisting the flowers in my hand. Dogwood blossoms are white, with the edges tipped with dark red, the color of dried blood. Many Baptists believe Christ was crucified on wood made from this tree, and afterward, it flowered these bloody crosses as a kind of memorial to him. I used to take this as proof of God, these trees, and then I learned it wasn’t in the Bible, that it was just a story somebody made up. To which my mother said, “Just because it’s a story don’t mean it ain’t true.” I wondered whether or not she would have thought the baptistery was a good idea. It had divided the church, with many believing, like Hubert Dickerson, that it was foolishness. “Throwing money in the wind,” he had said after the vote to build it had passed. And now the hole my father had made in the wall was a window. The window looked into the baptistery: a blue-tinted tub about four feet deep, much smaller than the one that had been at the coliseum, and on the wall above it, facing the congregation, was a mural of rolling hills and blue sky. The baptistery only lacked the water line being finished. My father had joked if he couldn’t install a drain and faucet soon, then he would just use a bucket and hose.

  At Mrs. Audean’s upright piano, I played some notes, banging out “Heart and Soul” and then what little I knew of “In the Garden.” I removed my sneakers and slid my socked feet across the carpeting that ran between the pews to the front door, my fingers crackling with static. Next I sprawled out on the sweet-smelling floor and did snow angels, trying to make my body into one ball of electricity, and in all that movement, my pants slid down, and the carpet cupped my naked ass like a warm paw. From somewhere far away, the air-conditioning kicked on with its reassuring hum. On the wall, beside the front doors, was a painting of Jesus similar to the one in my father’s office except in this one he was holding a lamb in his arms, a cone of light circling his head. To the left of the picture was the offertory table. Etched into the side of the wood were the words we repeated when we drank of the body and ate of the flesh: DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME. Instead of the bread and juice, today there was a row of white candles on the table, stubby things no bigger than my fingers. I waddled over to them, my shorts tangled about my knees.

  The drone of the air conditioner blunted any noise my father might have made in returning to Second Baptist. His movements are easy to trace. He entered through the side door that led into his office and went down the hallway and climbed into the baptistery from the back entrance. I’m not sure how long he was standing there before he noticed me. The image of his son prone on the church floor, nudging a candle in a
nd out of himself, must have taken more than a few seconds to fully process.

  When I saw him, it was already too late. I struggled to stand, to pull up my shorts. If I had been faster about it, I would have bolted out of the church, put as much space between my father and me as I could. But I was not fast, and he reached me in no time at all. He was not a violent man, but this—this—had been on the docket for a long time. Ever since I’d first embarrassed him in the choir with my sissified dancing. When his fist first landed against the side of my face, I almost sighed. Finally, I thought. Let it come. Let it all fall down. A rage had broken loose from inside him. He beat me until there was no cry left in either of our throats, and then he fell to floor, red faced and exhausted.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.”

  I grabbed a pew and got to my feet before he had fully recovered. The door to the outside had never seemed so far away as I stumbled toward it.

  “Rooster,” my father called, but he wasn’t coming after me. He was still too winded.

  —

  My back had taken the worst of it, but nothing serious enough to keep me from walking. If anything, the walking helped loosen the soreness in my joints. I rambled through Hawshaw not knowing where to go but ending up at the only place I knew to go: the China Belle. I had this notion that Suzette would see me like this, all bruised and beaten up, and instantly take pity. She would lead me into the back office and clean me off, touching me tenderly. We would never speak of what had happened between us that awful night six months before, and by the end of the evening, we’d have it all worked out. She’d tell me I could stay with her, with the Jins. I knew it was fantasy. That didn’t stop me, however, from going into the restaurant with this ridiculous hope that seeing her would make everything better.