Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  Over the next few weeks, we ramped up our picketing schedule and protested most afternoons at the 10th Street entrance. In addition to the spiteful comments we got from people driving by, someone mooned us out of a truck window one afternoon. “Don’t look at that,” my mother said hurriedly when it happened, putting her arms around me and Sara and directing us away from the road. But we had seen, and we giggled about it later with Megan. It was the first time either of us had seen a grownup’s naked rear end. People in the outside world were so weird, we decided. What normal person would do something that gross? And to a group of God-fearing Christians who were just trying to do the right thing?

  Regular counter-protestors appeared with their own signs. Other churches started picketing—against us! They carried signs that answered back to ours, with slogans like GOD LOVES EVERYONE—which, we knew from Gramps’s sermons, was definitely not the case. And their signs definitely weren’t up to WBC’s standards. White background with boring red writing—how was that supposed to grab anyone’s attention compared to our multicolored, eye-popping signs?

  It wasn’t long before there were enough people in the counter-protests that the men in our group made the decision to link arms to create a barrier against the angry masses. Shirl and the others decided to make light of the situation and nickname the various members of the throng who, they had decided, wanted to kill us.

  A woman across the street, who seemed always to be wearing violet-hued outfits as she yelled back at us, became “Purple Pig.” A large woman who would drive a tiny tan pickup truck past us and give us the finger became “Sun Block.” Both names seemed a little hypocritical given how many of my aunts and uncles tended to be on the larger side, but I would never have dared point this out. “Witch,” “Karl the Fat Fag,” and “Church Whore” were among the other slurs they came up with for the various townspeople who opposed us. This was the beginning of a long tradition of mocking those who came out against us publicly.

  The rhythm of a picket quickly became second nature. We would show up with our signs and people would drive and walk by, yelling or cursing at us, or worse. The adults—especially Gramps—would just smile and laugh in response, safe in the knowledge that God was on their side and would provide divine protection. So we learned to react that way too. Soon enough, I was hardened to all manner of R-rated insults, and had learned to smile them down.

  During those first weeks, Gramps preached in church that what we were doing on the streets of Topeka was a loving gesture. That the way to love your neighbor was to rebuke them; to help them see the error of their ways and turn to God. It was only later that I figured out that Gramps didn’t really expect anyone outside of the church to change their ways—that it was us, and us alone, who were the chosen servants of God.

  UNTIL THE YEAR WE BEGAN PICKETING, MY LIFE DIDN’T SEEM all that different from any other Kansas kid. I was born in 1983, the year Cabbage Patch Dolls came out, and the running joke among my relatives was how much I looked like one, with my chubby face and dimples. I grew up in a comfortable house, on the large side of average, on a leafy street named Holly Lane, within easy walking distance of all the other family members and church. Life revolved around school, church, and playing with my siblings and cousins on the “block.” My grade school was a five-minute walk from the house, so every morning, Megan, Josh, and Jacob would come by for me and Sara, and all of us would go together. In many ways, we were pretty regular kids. We loved playing sports, especially volleyball, which helped us fit in and was a distraction from the ways in which we were different. I had friends from school over to the house in those days, though I didn’t get to have those playdates as frequently as most kids did. I also had never cut my hair, which made me, my sister, and my female cousins a bit of a curiosity. The other kids frequently asked why we never cut our hair. “Because the Bible says not to!” we would respond, shocked they didn’t know this already.

  Hair was one of the ways that people in Topeka knew we were Phelps girls, by our long, long braids or ponytail, or big bun. By the time I was ten, my hair was all the way past my butt. So was Sara’s and Jael’s, and all the other cousins too, except for Megan, whose hair was entirely too curly and barely passed her shoulders. We were proud of our long hair, and took good care of it. I washed mine every single day and brushed it meticulously, and then I would always put it up in a bun. It was easier than having to deal with a fancy haircut, and we didn’t have to use hair products. Sometimes Megan would French braid my hair; I enjoyed the style and the time we were able to sit and talk.

  The church always played a bigger role in our lives than it did in those of most of the kids I knew. Nearly everyone at school went to a church of some kind, but nobody else had their own grandfather for a minister or had their very own family chapel. And the dramatic, graphic lessons we learned on Sundays—TULIP, the aspects of hell, predestination—were a lot more stringent than the typical Christian sermons being preached in Topeka’s typical Midwestern Methodist churches.

  In 1995, a few years after the picketing had started, I began to notice a difference in how I was treated at middle school. Kids didn’t like me anymore. They didn’t talk to me like they used to, and they openly whispered about me while I was near them. I no longer had an assured place with my friends in the cafeteria. I sat with my sister and cousins when we had the same lunch period.

  I had been prepared for this for years; Gramps had been preaching about it since I was three. God’s elect would be persecuted, and there was no better place for persecution than middle school.

  We grew up in the shadow of our parents, aunts, and uncles having been mocked mercilessly at school for being related to a crusading civil rights lawyer. Gramps’s being the one attorney in Topeka who regularly represented black clients didn’t make him overly popular in the informally segregated town in the 1960s, and my uncle Tim used to tell us about how he was beaten up by kids at school for having, as he reported they’d said, a “nigger-lover” for a father. So Gramps always raised his kids to accept, and even cherish, being seen as different from the other kids—and that mindset was passed down to us as we were increasingly trained to see the entirety of the outside world as sinful.

  I had been warned this was coming, and I tried not to let it get to me—I wanted to wear their judgment like a badge of honor, just as Gramps had instructed. I really did feel special for having been chosen by God to suffer affliction for His sake. There was something so rewarding knowing we were 100 percent right and everyone else was wrong. I wasn’t afraid of the world—I was sorry for everyone else, because they had no idea what was in store for them. Even if we told them a million times they were going to hell, they didn’t believe it. My sister Sara didn’t share my feelings; being ostracized at school got to her early, and she was quietly miserable.

  But when we were at home, life was an oasis—especially compared to Gramps’s weekly fire-and-brimstone sermons and the rocky terrain of middle school. My father may have been Fred Phelps’s eldest son, but he hadn’t inherited much of Gramps’s temperament. My parents were both quiet people, not given to yelling or big displays of emotion. They would usually show their displeasure with us by just giving us the silent treatment—and they showed their affection for us sparingly. (I would only learn later in life that this was not what it was like for everyone growing up.) They didn’t hug us very much, and kisses were all but unheard of, at least as soon as we were old enough to be out of diapers. A backrub was about as much intimacy as we could hope for from either of them. Sometimes my parents felt like vaguely detached caretakers: We knew they had our best interests at heart, but we also knew we had to follow the rules in order to stay in their good graces. Politeness—and godliness, of course—was key. From a very young age, I was always on guard against upsetting, annoying, or disappointing them. Being ignored—or worse, shamed—by them felt worse to me than getting screamed at (which was what you could expect if you were one of Shirl’s eleven kids).

&nbs
p; My mother, following the teachings of conservative Christianity, was submissive to my father as the head of the household. Anything my dad, or the church, told her, she would do without question. She was also infinitely patient, which would serve her well when she started running a day care at our house several years after I was born. My father wasn’t as patient with us. He was quiet, but we could tell by his tensed face, fidgeting fingers, and quicker breathing he was getting irritated with us. He also wasn’t around nearly as much as my mom. When I was little, he worked as a parole officer, so he wasn’t home much; later, he became a staff attorney with the Kansas Department of Corrections, a position he holds to this day.

  When he was home, he didn’t speak to us all that much. He was a germaphobe, washing his hands constantly, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with changing diapers—one of his favorite phrases was “Get that away from me!” Certainly, he wanted nothing to do with his kids if we were ever coughing or sneezing or had stomachaches, as was bound to happen in a house with four children. But he did love sports and liked to throw a baseball or shoot baskets with us.

  He was often away on business and had to stay in a hotel in Wichita, or other places too far away to make the daily drive. Years later I learned he had had his lawyer’s license suspended, for his involvement in the case that got Gramps’ federal law license revoked entirely, and subsequently had trouble finding work near home. He would take an air mattress with him because the motel beds were too uncomfortable (and, given his germaphobia, possibly because of the fear of touching a motel bed) and return late the following evening, so we would regularly go several days without seeing him.

  My mom didn’t fear germs like my dad did, but health was a big obsession with both of them. While junk food and premade dishes were popular in our extended family—Gramps loved having Subway sandwiches on hand in his fridge, while Shirl was always heating up premade eggrolls and baking cookies from packaged dough—my mom was a good cook who made most things from scratch. Our house always smelled of freshly baked bread or something else scrumptious cooking in the oven. Making bread, kneading it, and rolling it out on our wooden dining room table was one of my and Sara’s favorite activities. My mom was good at including us in everything, making us feel we were a part of things. She may not have hugged us very often, but she made us feel loved and wanted.

  MY PARENTS SCRUPULOUSLY FOLLOWED THE PRECEPTS OF THE church—including, increasingly, not allowing us to socialize with any kids outside of the church unless it was for a school project—but they were still a constant target for scrutiny within the church. My dad had married an outsider, which made them both suspect. Everyone is always watching someone in the church, and Shirl especially made it her business to keep tabs on the way my mom was raising us. If she saw something she didn’t think was right, she didn’t hesitate in upbraiding her for it. “Dr. Spock is your god,” she would sneer at my mother if she tried some modern parenting technique. If we were acting up, my even-tempered mom was more inclined to rationalize with us instead of immediately concluding our hearts were in the wrong place and that we were children of the devil—as Shirl did with her children. If my mom read up on natural remedies for us, Shirl would tell her, “You need to trust in the Lord.” There was a standard my mother was supposed to be following, and it wasn’t written down anywhere—she had to figure it out through trial and error, being scolded for her errors by Shirl. When I got a little older, I began to get picked on for being part of the church, so I went home and talked to my mom about it. “It’s not like we always talk about religion,” I told her. “Yes,” she agreed, “it’s a big part of our lives, but it’s not everything.” She didn’t shove religion down our throats every day like Shirl did; she acted kind and respectful toward everyone.

  My brother Ben, much older than me, used to get in trouble with the aunts and uncles too for being too silly. “How is that serving God?” they’d scold him. But it never got him down. Even if a lot of his humor was at my expense, I was glad to have someone in the family who liked to laugh. He did get me in trouble a lot when he’d sneakily say something very quietly to me, to which I would respond loudly. My parents did not like loudness.

  DESPITE THEIR BEST EFFORTS, I TENDED TO BE BETTER FRIENDS with my rowdy boy cousins than the quieter girls. My sister and I would play with Barbie dolls and our Snoopy snow cone maker, but I preferred to be out running around with the boys than playing what I thought of as girly games. Plus, the boy cousins were closer to my age, and when I tried to hang around with Sara and our church friend Katherine, they just looked at me as the little sister who kept pestering them.

  All the kids, whatever their ages, had a reliable source of kindness in our grandmother, who was more affectionate than my parents and whose doors were always open to us. Sweet, tiny Gran was always very gentle and motherly. She never shamed me when I didn’t know something, and always helped me with anything I needed, from homework to Bible questions to, later on, advice about becoming a woman.

  She was a counterpoint to Gramps, an example of kindness and gentleness at its finest. I always felt so secure and safe around her (even during the church’s “intervention” directed at me, much later on, when I felt the whole world was against me). Sometimes, when Gramps would go on an hour or more with his religious ramblings, she would take pity on me. In her mild but effective way, she’d prevail on him to stop so I could leave.

  Our favorite weekend activity was sleepovers at Gran and Gramps’s place. Megan, Josh, Jacob, and I would line up our sleeping bags together in the brown-carpeted fireplace room, and binge on all kinds of delicious junk food. Our favorite dish was nachos with Old El Paso sauce and shredded cheese, for which we’d rinse the chips off with water to remove the salt and to make them softer for Gran. Her teeth didn’t work very well, and we didn’t mind if the chips were a little bendy. For dessert, there’d be ice cream and Milky Ways. Sitting at the kitchen table behind heaping bowls of ice cream, we’d watch Gran play solitaire, eventually catching on and learning how to play ourselves. Sometimes she would show us old jewelry, and once she even gave me one of her old rings that, many years later, I would wear when I got married. Those sleepovers were one of the rare occasions when we didn’t really talk about religion. I look back on them as being one of the only times we got to just be kids and have fun.

  There weren’t many moments like that. We got to go to the park or skating rink, play sports, go to the movies and out to dinner, and go clothes and music shopping, but we almost always had the responsibility of watching over the younger kids. Fun activities turned out to be not quite as fun when we had to constantly monitor the little ones; I was always worried they would run off somewhere or start screaming and make a scene, and then I would get reprimanded for it. We were also burdened with being in the public eye. People recognized us when we went out—if they didn’t know us personally, they could tell by the girls’ long hair. (There were occasional advantages to having my hair as long as it was, though. Later on, in middle school, everyone was busy coloring their hair. We weren’t allowed to do any such thing, of course, but because my hair reached nearly all the way down my back, I could grab a lock of it and color it with pink highlighter. I liked that look.)

  JUST AS WE WEREN’T ALLOWED TO CUT OUR HAIR, WE CERTAINLY weren’t allowed any kind of cosmetics. The assumption by our elders was that we must be trying to attract attention by wearing makeup, rather than just doing it because it was fun, because everybody else was doing it, because school was boring. Every move any of us made that stepped outside the bounds of the church was seen as having an ulterior motive—and someone (usually Shirl) was going to get to the bottom of it.

  But one day my sister Sara rebelled. She bought a bottle of red nail polish at the Walgreens in Topeka and painted her nails one night when nobody was looking. The next morning, she came down to breakfast wearing gloves. “Why do you have gloves on while you’re eating toast?” my mom asked. Sara claimed she was cold. Later, when she
came home from school and my mom saw the polish, she just laughed—which was very unlike what would have happened had she been one of Shirl’s kids.

  With Shirl, we knew you had to walk on eggshells or risk a tongue-lashing, or worse. With Gramps, it depended on the day. Much of the time, he was a doting grandfather to us—unless you did something he considered stupid or ignorant, and then he’d let us have it, in that thunderous voice of his. We all lived in fear of having Gramps call us dumb, a mark of shame. But I loved it when he would jokingly call me a “Troublemaker” or say, “Here comes trouble” when I entered a room. He said it so much that when I was clothes shopping and saw a black shirt with TROUBLEMAKER written in glittery white cursive writing, I couldn’t resist buying it.

  Often, though, he would play with us like any other grandpa. He seemed like a different person when he was outside of the church. In the afternoons, when we got home from school, he would come out to the block, dressed in his track suit, and join in whatever we were doing. In the summer, he’d jump into the huge swimming pool and play Marco Polo with us. But his favorite activity was running, a holdover from his younger years. Gramps had been a great hurdler and had always been convinced that his family needed to be in good shape to be “fit for the battle.” When I was five, Runner’s World magazine even did a story about Gramps’s obsession with running and his strict regimen for his kids, which included making them run several miles every day and even more on the weekends when they had more time. He had mellowed by the time my generation came around, but he still encouraged all us kids to get into the habit of running as much as possible. Down the street from our house, there was a little circular park; when I was at a loss for something to do, my dad would say to me, “Run down to the circle and run around it ten times.” I don’t remember ever objecting to this, or thinking it was too harsh. I liked to play sports and I liked to be outside. But there was a larger reason for Gramps’s emphasis on physical fitness: The running was so we would be in shape to fight the holy war.