Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  STILL, WHILE I DIDN’T HAVE ANY INTEREST IN BOYS AT SCHOOL, I did wonder how the older people in the church had ever found their spouses to begin with. How had they been allowed to be attracted to another person, to show their emotions? I never got up the courage to ask any of the adults about this, for fear of being mocked or chastised.

  When my older brother began dating the woman who is now his wife, he had to be chaperoned at all times, sometimes with cousins as young as six or seven. I’m not sure why anyone thought the presence of a child that young would maintain order or propriety, but that was the rule: There had to be someone else there, even if that someone else was in first grade.

  But for a church that stringently maintained rules about one man and one woman in marriage, there were a surprising number of scandalous episodes involving affairs and, several times, miscarriages that resulted from them.

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, MY AUNT MARGE HAD A TRYST WITH one of the rare outsiders who’d started coming to the church. His name was George, and he began coming to services with his wife, Cindy, who’d met another aunt of mine, Rachel, through their work at the courthouse in the Child in Need of Care (CINC) department, where Rachel worked when she wasn’t at Phelps-Chartered. They were going to become church members.

  But things fell apart between the couple when Cindy found out about her husband and Marge. She divorced him and left the church, scandalously scrawling THIS IS BULLSHIT in the Bible Gramps had given her.

  It wasn’t long after that we learned that Marge was pregnant, and we found this out because she had been ordered—by Gramps or Shirl, most likely—to confess to it in front of the entire congregation. George was in church the morning she did it, and I remember seeing him sitting with his head bowed way down, clutching his Bible with one hand and holding his head with the other.

  Marge’s adopted son Jacob, who was twelve at the time, began crying as she explained that she had become pregnant because of an illicit affair with George. “You had sex with him?” he yelled at her through his tears, in front of everyone. Jacob had always been kind of slow for his age. They would never admit there was anything wrong with him, though, or anyone else in the church; it simply wasn’t conceivable that there could be anything wrong with God’s chosen ones. (My cousin Zach, who left the church a couple of years ago, was finally diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder.)

  Later that day, when Jacob and I were walking to a picket at the corner of 17th and Gage, he asked me worriedly, “Do you think my mom is going to hell?” “I dunno,” I said. “I don’t think anybody knows, but she’s certainly not behaving herself.”

  Soon after that announcement, George disappeared. We were told it was because he was a nonbeliever who’d never be one of God’s elect, though it seemed more likely that he couldn’t handle the stress and scrutiny of Marge’s pregnancy shaming.

  When she was about eight months pregnant, Marge got sick. She went into Gran’s room and lay down on the couch, telling my other aunts that the baby hadn’t moved in a few days. They took her to the hospital, and she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. My aunt Rachel told me, “The doctors say maybe the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, but we all know what really happened—God did it.” Marge herself joined in the chorus, telling the congregation on the Sunday after the stillbirth, “This is God’s judgment on me.”

  But the baby had not been left at the hospital, we discovered. One afternoon, Jacob took me into Gran’s bathroom, where alongside the washer and dryer they had a large meat freezer. He opened it and showed me a Styrofoam cooler sitting on top of the meat. Inside was Marge’s baby, tiny and bluish; she probably weighed four pounds, with two of those pounds settled in her chubby cheeks. We stared at her silently. I had never seen a dead body before, and I doubt he had either. Jacob reached in and put his teddy bear on top of her and closed the top.

  The baby was buried in the yard, near the volleyball court, where there was a small patch of open grass. Marge named her Hannah. They had a family funeral and buried her with a tiny stone on top, bearing no name at all. Later, they would bury another stillborn baby—this one belonging to Shirl, who named her dead son Jeremiah. Even though I never got the opportunity to meet these sweet babies, tears streamed down my face during both funerals. Losing a baby is horrible. During these moments both Marge and Shirl were far from their hate-spewing selves. I felt sorry for them—what a terrible thing to go through.

  THESE WERE SECRETS THAT WERE KEPT ON LOCKDOWN WITHIN the family, but we weren’t supposed to talk about the church at all when we were out in the world—other than at a picket—or at school. Even though I had grown up being prepared to be demonized, marginalized, and hated by my classmates, I expected to be treated like anyone else by the students and, more importantly, by the teachers, who were supposed to be fair. For the most part, I wasn’t actively picked on by the other kids. They would mostly just ask questions: “Why do you guys do that?” When people were mean to me, I could generally shrug it off. I joined the volleyball team, and I did track; I was a horrible runner, but I could throw the shot put fairly well. Being good at something athletic made it much easier to fit in and avoid bullying. There were always a few people who would single me out, though. One girl, whom I had never spoken to in my life, would be sure to say, “I hate that girl,” every time I walked past her. But Sara, who was more sensitive than me and didn’t have the benefit of being into sports (other than tennis) got it worse than I did.

  ONE DAY, THE TWO OF US WERE WALKING BACK INTO SCHOOL after having left to get lunch. As we crossed through the science building to get to another classroom on the other side, we caught sight of a girl called Destinee, who was glaring in our direction.

  “I don’t like that girl,” Sara muttered to me. Destinee whipped around.

  “What did you just say?” She walked up to my sister and slapped her. Stunned, Sara recoiled, but I was furious. I ran over in front of Destinee, grabbed her forearms, and twisted them back. We wrestled for a minute until my science teacher, Mr. Rupp, broke it up, sending all of us to the principal’s office.

  And who should come to the office to meet us? Not our parents but Shirl, who was always in charge of this kind of thing.

  “Stay calm,” she commanded us as we sat outside the office with her. “Just tell them what happened. You didn’t do anything wrong.” We all had to go in and tell our sides of the story.

  Afterward, I headed to choir practice as usual, and a girl named Caitlin caught up with me in the hallway. She had always been very kind to me.

  “What happened?” she said. “Everyone’s talking.” I filled her in, but as I was talking Destinee walked by us, uncomfortably close. I got shaky; I was afraid she was going to hit me. She ultimately got suspended for hitting Sara.

  Right after the meeting, I had to rush to the theater to try on my costume for The Sound of Music, where I was playing—what else—a nun. Backstage in the costume closet, I tried not to cry, but I clearly looked upset. Ashley, a fellow nun, looked concerned.

  “Did a boy break up with you?” she asked. I half laughed. “You know I don’t date!” I said. That was what most everyone my age worried about, though. I wasn’t allowed to even think about it, although my friend Antwayn regularly told me he had a crush on me. I always believed he was gay—he certainly seemed that way to me, anyway—but it didn’t mean I was rude to him. We were instructed to be nice to everyone when we were out in the world. “You never know how your message is going to fall in their hearts,” we were told by Gramps. So unfailing friendliness—even when we were holding a sign that preached hate—was our bylaw.

  AND TO BE FAIR, WE DID HOLD SIGNS NEAR SCHOOL, ALTHOUGH never on school grounds (that would have violated Gramps’s policy of not talking about Westboro there). At Topeka West, we held a weekly picket across the street from the school parking lot, so all the kids coming and going could see the signs. Because I wasn’t technically in school, it was OK for me to talk to kids about Westboro and religion. Some
were curious; one guy named Joe came over once and asked me what the signs were about. I told him we were picketing because there was a Gay Student Alliance, and that students were at an impressionable age and needed to see our signs to know that gay support groups were wrong. He didn’t say much about what he believed one way or another; I got the sense he’d been dared by his friends to come up to us. Other kids weren’t so reserved. Some would save the parts of the school lunch they didn’t want—usually the vegetables—and throw them at us out of car windows as they were pulling away.

  MORE WORRISOME THAN HATE FROM FELLOW STUDENTS WAS when teachers would turn against us. I was a good student; I worked hard to maintain a perfect GPA so I could get a scholarship to Washburn University, as I’d long dreamed.

  Honors English in my junior year was taught by Mrs. Wilson. I could tell straightaway that she didn’t like me, so I tried to fly under the radar. One day, our assignment was to read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the sermon by Jonathan Edwards that describes people going to hell. It was the basis for many of Gramps’s own sermons. I stayed silent during that class discussion, because I feared the reaction from my classmates; I didn’t want anyone claiming I had talked about religion.

  I kept getting Cs in her class despite feeling sure I’d done the work right. I would write a paper and have my mom and my aunts read it, go into class feeling good, and get a middling grade. She seemed to fairly obviously not like me, and I knew she was a Unitarian—they’re the ones who are famously tolerant of gays in the church—so I strongly suspected it had to do with the church. I didn’t know who to talk to about it; all I wanted to do at school was to go about my business without being noticed, get good grades, and not mention the church. But I knew those Cs would hurt my chances of going to college and venturing further away from my family.

  I finally told Ben, who’d had Mrs. Wilson for a teacher too, what was going on. The class syllabus was the same as it had been back when he was a student, eight years earlier, so he gave me one of his A-grade papers, and I copied it word for word—something I’d never have done otherwise, but we agreed we wanted to test out my theory. Again, she gave me a C.

  I confessed to my parents what we’d done, and my dad called my teacher that night. “You know what you’re doing, and you’re not going to get away with it!” I could hear him from the next room. As I’ve mentioned, he gets pretty scary when he gets mad. Even though his anger was aimed at her and not me, I was incredibly nervous. Through the right channels, I got my grade changed to not harm my GPA.

  THERE WERE OTHER INSTANCES WHEN TEACHERS TREATED ME differently for being from WBC. I always loved singing, and in high school I wanted to be a part of Singers, the top choral group in the school. But I had been warned about the teacher, Mrs. Epoch, by my family. I had, in fact, been told that she was evil and to stay away from her. This likely meant that she had at some point spoken publicly against the church. As it turned out, she did seem to harbor a grudge against me. She told me I couldn’t be in the group—until I got a perfect score from the audition judges, which even she couldn’t refute.

  THEN THERE WAS SEMINAR, A STUDY HALL CLASS WHERE WE got an A just for showing up every day. We could arrange to get help from other teachers during the period, which I usually did. I could tell the teacher didn’t like me, so I arranged to be gone as much as possible. Later in the day, a girl named Chrissy, who was a cheerleader, pulled me aside. “I can’t believe what she was saying about you,” she told me. Apparently after I’d left class, the teacher had remarked, “I wish I had the guts to tell her what I think about her. The nerve of her, picketing in front of the school every week.” I got a B in that class, despite its being an easy A. Again, going through the right channels, I was able to stay in this mandatory class without it affecting my GPA.

  THERE WERE, HOWEVER, SOME TEACHERS WHO LOOKED AT US as individuals rather than extensions of the church. Mr. Perry taught Current Issues and was always fair and understanding when my family came up. One of our favorite English teachers, Mr. Newbery, encouraged us to keep notebooks and journals of our thoughts. He would read them periodically and leave us notes in the margins. Later, his work with Megan and Grace would help them find the strength to leave the church.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER THE VINTAGE, THERE WAS ANOTHER TURNING point for us, in the form of a major news story about a young man in Wyoming who had been killed for being gay. One Sunday after church, I heard a conversation among my aunts and uncles about a college student named Matthew Shepard, who had been “trolling for sex” and gotten mixed up with the wrong guys. God, they said, had planned for him to run into the two men who tortured him and left him tied to a fence to die. This was apt punishment, we kids were told, for his sin of being a fag. I felt a creeping sense of disbelief that we were all celebrating such a grisly murder, but the more I talked to my cousins about it, the more Gramps’s views were reinforced for me: He was a disgusting, filthy fag and shouldn’t have been doing what he did.

  The church’s views were, as usual, in direct contrast to what was being said about the killing in the media, which was that Shepard had been the innocent target of a despicable hate crime—when, in reality, he was anything but innocent because he’d been looking for immoral sex, the church said. As Gramps told us on so many occasions, anyone outside our church was so deluded and defiled they had no idea what the real story was.

  He saw this incident as a prime opportunity for some higher-profile picketing, and organized a group to drive to Shepard’s funeral in Casper, Wyoming. A MATT IN HELL sign was created for the occasion, with a cutout of the young man’s head emblazoned with an upside-down pink triangle: the sign of the gay rights movement, turned upside down. Gramps would hold that one, as well as another one targeted to calls for more hate crime legislation: NO SPECIAL LAWS FOR FAGS.

  At the picket, which we excitedly watched on the national news, Gramps wore his traditional windbreaker and cowboy hat, brandishing his signs and laughing. “You should have seen all those fags,” he would tell us later, chortling. (Years later when a play, The Laramie Project, was written about Shepard’s life, we would picket that too. Supporters of Shepard showed up at the picket, dressed as angels with huge sheet-covered white wings that effectively blocked our group from being seen by anyone attending the show. It was a pretty effective stunt—and we knew all about those.)

  On the way home from the funeral, my uncle Charles got into a car accident on the highway and flipped his jeep. Nobody was hurt, thankfully. But I wondered why God would let such a thing happen to a group of His chosen people on their way to spread His word.

  Looking back on it today, I feel like it was glaringly wrong to picket somebody’s funeral. But I didn’t think that then. I just thought—like we all did, like we’d been told—that we were there to warn the people who were alive. That they should repent. The Westboro rationale for everything.

  When I think now of the way that boy died, tied up on that post, I feel awful. But at the time, I didn’t think it was that big a deal—or maybe I didn’t think about it that much, period. Now I’m a mother, and all I can think is what if that happened to my son; what if somebody tied him up and left him to die?

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE SHEPARD PICKET, THE CHURCH’S address had been made public and we were seeing a steep increase in hate mail. In Gramps’s eyes, business was better than ever—people were angrier with us than they’d ever been before. It was the first time the church had ever publicly targeted a person’s funeral, and the outrage was pouring in every day.

  One of my after-school chores was to go to Gran and Gramps’s house and help out with whatever they needed, which included getting the mail. The stack of letters in the mailbox usually included at least one or two handwritten notes telling them off.

  My favorite part, though, was arriving in Gran’s kitchen after school, taking a seat at one of the tall chairs in the kitchen, and talking about life with her as she puttered around. One afternoon she remembered she ne
eded to get the mail, and I stopped her, jumping out of my chair and jogging through the church sanctuary, through the green office, and out the double doors to the front of the church with its green and white striped canopy. Smiling all the way. We were always supposed to be smiling, but I actually felt like doing it when I was at Gran and Gramps’s place. Down the sidewalk a short distance was the mailbox, next to the church marquee, creepily sporting a bullet hole someone had recently put in it. I grabbed the stack of mail and headed into the fireplace room where Gran spent a lot of her downtime. It was more comfortable to sit on the couch in there, so I plopped down and yelled into the pantry to ask if I could open the mail. Gran, who was organizing bottles of Diet Pepsi and cans of soup, said yes. Sitting on the couch, I thumbed through the mail, putting aside junk mailers. I spotted a handwritten letter—my favorite—and wanted to open it. I loved reading the letters. Most of the time they were from people who disagreed with or outright hated us. But there were a few, especially in the early years, that were supportive. I was always curious about what others had to say. This one was a note card with the words EAT SHIT AND DIE written inside. Folded inside the card was a piece of toilet paper with a streak of brown on it. My excitement turned to shock. I don’t know which was more upsetting, seeing the word “shit” or the thing itself. I sat quietly for a couple of minutes, wondering what in the world was wrong with this person that they’d want to do something like this. It was, I concluded, just more verification of everything we’d been told about how people would treat us for preaching the truth. Closing the card, I went to Gran in the kitchen and told her about it.