Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  But there were a couple of incidents that made me wonder if my dad had taken the “spareth his rod” verse to heart. The first was when I was nine years old, in the third grade. My oldest sister, Sharon, had lied to my dad about something petty, and blamed me for it, like most siblings do now and then. I hated when I would get in trouble for something I didn’t do, and would defend myself until my last breath. “That’s not true, and you know it!” I yelled at her in the kitchen, as I was standing there waiting for something to heat up in the microwave. My father heard and came back into the kitchen with a dark look on his face, and I knew I’d been too loud and sounded too wild. He punched my upper left arm hard—really hard. Tears sprang to my eyes and I tried not to cry, but I was shocked. I had never been hit like that before. The next day at school, I had a huge bruise where he’d punched me. My teacher called me over during a break in class and asked me what happened. I knew my dad would get in trouble if I told her the truth, so I said I didn’t remember—I was an active kid, so it was pretty believable that I’d run into something or fallen down while playing.

  The next time it happened, I was twelve years old. We had gotten McDonald’s for dinner, and I had just helped myself to some French fries when Ben started teasing me, as he did constantly. “You’re too fat to have fries, Libby,” he said. He would always tell me I was stupid and fat; my mom used to tell me I was fat, too. “Libby Big Butt,” they’d call me, or sometimes, less meanly, “Libby Long Legs.” I never understood it, because I really wasn’t fat, and I knew I wasn’t. But it always hurt my feelings anyway.

  I threw the handful of fries down on the table in anger, and they spilled onto my dad’s placemat. His face hardened instantly. “You’d better get out of here. Right now,” my father said in a low voice. I could tell he was furious. I put my food down immediately and ran for the stairs. Terrified, I tried to think of where he wouldn’t find me. I went into my brother’s bedroom and hid in his closet. Breathing heavily, my heart beating a mile a minute, I heard my father coming upstairs, yelling my name ominously.

  It didn’t take him long to find me. Opening the closet door, he slapped my face. Hard. Then he grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the closet, and shoved me down the hallway. Trying to run, I reached the stairs and he caught up with me and shoved me again. I tumbled down the carpeted steps, crumpling into a sobbing heap at the bottom. No one else had moved from the table; they were sitting there motionless. My mom had likely told my brother and sister to be quiet and that my dad was in charge. I never threw food onto his placemat again, that was for sure.

  ONE OF THE MOST TRAUMATIC INCIDENTS EVER TO HAPPEN AT the block happened when I was thirteen, the summer of 1996. I was playing in the swimming pool with Josh, Jacob, and little Grace, who was only two at the time. Josh, in charge of watching his little sister, shirked his duty by ordering her to go inside and take a nap while we all played games in the deep end of the pool, competing to see who could make the biggest splash off the diving board. As Grace toddled away, we turned back to the game, shrieking and laughing as we jumped into the pool, narrowly missing landing on one another’s heads. When we tired of that, Jacob climbed out and ran inside to get popsicles for all of us. I swam toward the shallow end, as it would be challenging to tread water and hold the frozen treat at the same time. As I got to the other end of the pool, I froze: a small body lay on the floor of the pool, just under the water’s surface. Scooping Grace into my arms, I reached up and laid her on the ground, cupping her head in my hands so it wouldn’t hit the ground too hard. There was a weird purple color underneath her closed eyes and lips; I could see veins all over her face. She didn’t seem to be breathing. “Help!” I screamed, leaping out of the water and running into the open kitchen door at Gran and Gramps’s house. There was no answer to my shouts. I tore across the yard to Shirl and Brent’s house, where there was also no answer. Where was everyone?

  I remembered that Tim’s wife Lee Ann had just had a baby. Racing to their house, a couple of houses down, I found Tim in the backyard playing with a pack of the cousins with the garden hose, giving his wife a break from their other children to be alone with the new baby. I told him what had happened, and he told me to calm down and sent me into the house to tell Shirl, who was holding the baby, to call 911. When Tim and I got back to the pool, an ambulance was on its way. “Did you hit her head?” he asked. “What?” I asked, surprised. “Did you hit her head!” he asked again, accusingly. “No!” I said, offended by his question. Tim knew I had helped take care of kids for years already; I certainly knew to put my hand on the back of a little kid’s head when lying them down. Afterward at the hospital, Brent took me aside to thank me for what I’d done, though Shirl never did say anything to me about it. But what puzzled me, even more than the fact that she never mentioned it, was the fact that God never came up when people talked about the accident. If God was doing so much to punish sinners across the nation—visiting tragedies on people left and right—then why wasn’t it the same with us? Why was Grace’s near-death an accident instead of a punishment? Once again, I kept my questions to myself. But something felt odd about it, and that feeling didn’t go away.

  IN 1998, OUR PICKETING WAS GETTING MORE INTENSE AND beginning to turn into a genuine nationwide crusade; the demands of the church seemed to get larger every time you turned around. Gramps and his children started requiring that all families read the Bible at home every night, and gather for regular Bible study groups outside of Sunday services. The kids my age would have to do PowerPoint presentations on the Bible. Mine was on Noah and the flood—a favorite subject of Gramps, who viewed his family, and God’s looming destruction of the world, in a similar light. One point in my report that stood out for me was the phrase “And it repented the Lord that he had made man.” Did God feel that way about us now? Was he going to end it all again?

  I constantly worried I wasn’t good enough to be one of God’s elect, mostly because of the way Shirl treated me—like I was never good enough. It was terrifying to think the Lord would come and take his elect to heaven and the rest of us would be heading for hell, with the elect administering our punishment.

  One thing that we could count on was that our parents, or any adult, would go to the Bible to answer any pressing questions that we kids might have about life or death. Most of what we learned, we learned by absorption instead of by asking outright. This system was how I learned that there was to be no dating or marriage for my generation. I was never specifically told this, but I gathered it from people who were older than me that when all the kids were really young, they collectively decided none of us were going to date.

  I also knew almost nothing about getting my period. I knew there would be blood, but I didn’t really understand why or how. I asked my mom about it, and my brother Ben was nearby. So he took me aside and told me, “When you get to a certain age, you have to go into the bathroom and stick a needle inside yourself to make yourself bleed.” I didn’t know any better, and this terrified me until I started my period in the eighth grade. I was scared to use a tampon, because my mother didn’t want to discuss them with me, so I just used pads for years until I was seventeen and had to go on a trip to the Bahamas where I’d be wearing a bathing suit.

  I knew I couldn’t rely on my mom for help, so I went to Gran. At a picket one day, I asked her, “Isn’t there something I can do? Take a pill to make it stop?” She just sweetly laughed at me, saying, “You can’t mess with that!”

  Education about puberty, our bodies, or sex was frowned on in the church. We were never taught about any of it by our parents, though we learned a little bit in the Kansas public school system. At home, we absolutely never talked about sex. I knew that “be fruitful and multiply” means to have a lot of kids, but I learned that from sex education in the fifth grade. When my teacher taught us what sex was, I thought, “That is disgusting. I’m not supposed to be doing that.” I knew marriage was supposed to be one man, one woman, one lifetime, but the thought of a
nyone having sex—eww, gross!

  ONE DAY, IN EIGHTH GRADE ENGLISH CLASS, I FELT A TAP ON my shoulder. It was Brandon, a boy who sat behind me. His hands were shaking as he handed me a piece of lined paper. My hand touched his sweaty palm during the transfer. I felt my face turn crimson and immediately wondered why he was so nervous. Was I getting some sort of love note from a boy? This was completely forbidden. I felt my whole body heating up with shame. I opened the paper, and there was my homework from last night. He’d taken it when I wasn’t looking and returned it, which, if you’re going to be a cheater, was actually a decent thing to do. Thank God, I thought. That was all it was.

  That same year brought one of the most humiliating incidents in my entire school career. As I sat in math class, a boy put gum in my hair. I didn’t know right away, but when I heard kids giggling behind me I wondered what was up. “Check your hair,” one whispered. I put my hand to my head and felt a big gummy mess in my long brown hair. I whipped around. “Why did you do that? This is going to be hard to get out!” I could tell he felt bad for doing it already, but he acted tough. He said he wanted me to get my hair cut because it was against my religion. It was almost the end of class, and I went to the bathroom, fighting back tears. There was no way to get it out; I rode home on the bus with Sara and she helped me get it out with olive oil. Some of my hair had to be pulled out while we removed the gum. I was terrified of getting in trouble for it, even though it wasn’t my fault and we actually didn’t cut the hair; I lived with a constant fear of disappointing my parents or, worse, making my dad mad. Even when I broke a dish accidentally I would go into a panic, thinking I’d be in terrible trouble. But when my mom saw the chunk we’d taken out of my hair, she was calm—as she almost always was. As usual, she provided the calm outside the storm of both school and church.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GOING NATIONWIDE

  BY THE TIME I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, THE CHURCH WAS SETTING its sights beyond Topeka, sending groups of picketers all over the United States. Westboro’s message eventually spread to just about every country in the world—it was so easy, thanks to the Internet and relentless journalists who visited the church regularly to keep the world apprised of WBC’s every move.

  Initially, we had a calling tree to figure out who could go to which out-of-town pickets: Shirl would call three church members, who would each call three to four other members with the out-of-town picket specifics. The bottom of the tree would report back to the middle three, who were responsible for letting Shirl know by a specific time so she could take care of the logistics. As technology progressed and members became computer savvy, a program was designed for church members to log in and answer “yes” or “no” to a picket request. Once all the responses were submitted, Shirl would decide who would go where. All of this coordination and organization was done in Shirl’s house. She delegated a lot of this work to Megan. Increasingly, it was the church members of my generation—especially Ben, Megan, and my uncle Charles—who were the most computer savvy. Just as my parents’ generation had gone to law school, many of my cousins studied computer science, while others studied health care. All professions were discussed and approved by church members for their ability to help the church and its cause. We certainly knew that being well versed in computers would help spread our message farther and wider than ever before.

  ONE OF THE FIRST MAJOR OUT-OF-TOWN PICKETS WAS ALSO one of the scariest. It was June of 1995—I was twelve—when seven of us packed into Marge’s green van and traveled to Golden, Colorado, to picket outside the Coors Brewery. The beer company had just become the latest publicly traded corporation in the country—the twenty-first, to be exact—to extend employee benefits to same-sex couples. The decision had made national news, and the church felt obligated to picket the brewery. I was sent, along with three adults and three other children, for a picket that was sure to be big news and attract a great amount of media coverage. Marge, my aunt Abi, and Jennifer, a member from outside the family, all volunteered. Among the kids were Sara, Jacob, and Jennifer’s younger sister Katherine.

  Much of the dull drive through western Kansas was spent singing along to Faith Hill and Reba McEntire, who were favorites of my aunts’. I only knew the words to “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” so when that song wasn’t on I spent my time crammed between Sara and my cousin playing nonstop games of I Spy. As we crossed into Colorado, my eyes lit up. The beauty and striking immensity of the Rocky Mountains were just outside my window, and a wave of exhilaration overtook me. Living in the flatlands of Kansas, I had rarely gotten the opportunity to see such a majestic landscape.

  A bright red Coors sign announced we had reached our destination. I was thrilled to see that mountain ranges would be visible from the picket, and was antsy to get out of the van. I was so captivated that I neglected to pay attention to the enormous crowd waiting for us. (As I got older and out-of-town pickets became more regular, I continued to get excited about going to pickets with beaches and mountains, where I could have a fun vacation while preaching Gramps’s gospel.)

  Following a police escort, Marge navigated the van through a huge crowd of angry counter-protestors to the picket location outside the brewery. We scrambled out of the van and grabbed our signs and banners, doing our best to ignore the heckling and screaming of the crowd. It was just before two, and the sun was still high in the sky.

  “Go home! Go home!” they yelled as I grabbed a red, green, and black TURN OR BURN sign out of the back of the van, one of the less abrasive choices whose meaning, even at that young age, I felt I understood; it became my go-to sign for many pickets to come. Under police protection, we made our way to our designated picketing spot, where I took hold in the middle of our fifteen-foot banner bearing our website’s URL, GODHATESFAGS.COM. We made our line among a handful of police officers and hundreds of anti-Westboro activists, who quickly began to surround us on all sides. But, convinced we were God’s chosen messengers, we stood tall and unafraid. We were invincible.

  “God loves everyone!” someone nearby shouted over the roar of the noisy crowd, starting a chant that quickly spread. “God hates fags! God hates fag enablers!” responded the WBC adults in their loudest voices and in unison. Catching on, the other kids and I joined in.

  “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” someone else retorted, starting another chant.

  “You’re here, you’re queer, you’ll be in hell next year!” Marge screamed back, laughing. We picked up on this new chant with even more enthusiasm.

  Through all of the counter-protestors’ screams of “fuck you” and “go home,” passing cars honked their horns incessantly, and many people flipped us off. A few people even mooned us, evoking a cry of “mooner!” from the first one of us to spot a bare backside—that was our cue to turn our eyes to the ground. No matter the situation, the WBC knew how to prepare for a picket—we had a plan for everything.

  After a while some of the crowd started to lose steam and the chanting died down a bit. In a rare quiet moment, I took in the scene. The people there were from all walks of life: different sizes, ages, ethnicities, sexual preferences—the latter made evident by uninhibited kissing in front of us. Some wore bright colors and had wild hairstyles, everything from Mohawks to dreadlocks. Some had more piercings and tattoos than I could count and painted their fingernails black. I thought that was cool—I could never pull off black polish, I thought. Likewise the crazy hairstyles. I amused myself thinking just how my family would react if I came home with a Mohawk. The kissing, though, made me squirm, like PDA always did—and not really because they were gay. I felt that way when anybody got too kissy in public.

  Some of them, though, were still so infuriated that spit would fly out of their mouths as they shouted. They gestured violently, shaking their fingers hard as they spoke. They all had one thing in common: they were absolutely livid.

  I was still silently observing the crowd when I noticed a tall, dark-haired man with a small hoop e
arring in his right ear standing right behind me. He began to cough; I turned to see that he was skinny and sickly looking, and immediately feared he had AIDS. I was horrified by what I had learned of the disease in church, and assumed I was going to catch it from his coughing.

  “He keeps coughing on me!” I yelled to Abi, who was standing next to me singing a WBC-style parody of “Sing” by the Carpenters. She continued to sing against the noise of the crowd in a high falsetto voice. She had promised to watch over me during the picket and I leaned in closer to make sure she heard me. “Make him stop!” I begged, tears now welling in my eyes.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, as she tossed water on me from her water bottle to clean off what I assumed were AIDS-infested germs. She made a twisted, scornful face at the man, and he backed off for a second, intimidated.

  A few moments later, the coughing man began to hit my rear end at a quick, even tempo with his half empty water bottle, which made me feel even more revolted and unnerved. I turned to Abi, who was still singing and completely absorbed in the protest, but said nothing. Tears began streaming down my face. There was nothing I could do. I was helpless, knowing that no one there, not even the police, would be willing to help me.

  We gathered up to leave thirty minutes later, accompanied by a singing crowd.

  “Na-na-naaa-na. Na-na-naaa-na. Hey, hey, hey. Good-bye!” they cheered in unison. “Na-na-naaa-na. Na-na-naaa-na. Hey, hey, hey. God hates fags,” was our rehearsed response.

  On our way back to the van, I was shoved backward by someone in the crowd. Knocked flat on my back and still holding my sign with both hands, I screamed, fearing I’d soon be kicked and trampled by the enclosing mob. Two policemen came out of nowhere, grabbed me under each arm, and flung me up with more strength than necessary. They lifted me up with so much force I felt I was momentarily flying through the air. But it all happened so quickly that I was able to shake it off and catch up with the group without falling too far behind.