by Sarah Bird
I threw my arms out and started spinning with her. “We can commit ax murders!”
“We can have giant parties with live bands!”
“And circus animals!”
Didi stopped, picked up her bowl of ’rita, handed me mine, and we clinked. “To the Lair.”
“To the Lair.”
I loved the Lair; it was our clubhouse. Didi moved all the best stuff from her bedroom into the Lair, including her twin beds. I stripped the primo items from my room and brought them over. We bought a pair of really cute fifties lamps at the Disabled Veterans, some great madras bedspreads with lines of elephants marching across them, threw up some posters, and the Lair was ready. Pretty soon, I was spending more time at Didi’s house than I was at my own, which suited Mom fine.
My mother, who had barely left the house at all while Daddy was sick, hardly came home once he was gone. Every morning, one of the sistern would stop by and pick her up, then she’d spend the day at the Compound stitching quilts and dipping candles or praying and testifying. I couldn’t remember her ever being happier. She was always singing old-time hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross” when she came home but would stop when she saw me. Neither one of us was who the other wanted to see. So I spent more and more time at the Lair and she spent more and more time at the Compound.
I was home, though, getting foam board and my X-Acto knives for our world cultures class project, a scale model of the Temple of Dionysus we were constructing in the Lair, when my mom came home early. That day, she was so happy she didn’t stop singing when she saw me, just looked my way and beamed. It had been so long since she’d smiled in my direction that it didn’t bother me that her smile was for her goofy church, not me.
“What?” I asked, after she’d stood there grinning for so long I started smiling too. “What is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know how to make you truly understand.”
“Understand what?” I was still smiling but had started to worry.
“Understand what a glorious day this is for me. For us.”
“Us?”
“Oh Cyndi Rae, we’ve been approved to move to HomeTown.”
“You mean Houdek?”
“No, silly. Our real, true hometown. The home of our heart and spirit.”
“You mean that place in Mississippi.”
“Georgia. HomeTown is in Georgia and we’re going to move there. I’ve already made all the arrangements. We could move right now, but you’ll probably want to finish high school.”
I wanted to say something snippy like Yeah, finishing high school, that little detail. But I knew I had to control myself. My mom’s eyes were glittering. She was high, high on Heartland, high on group approval, high on sanctimoniousness, high on subjecting herself to a higher will, high on goopy pieties, high on a dream of a simpler life, in a simpler time that never existed. All those things had given her a strength she’d never had before, a strength that made her dangerous. I had to be very careful.
“So, we’ll move after you finish high school.”
“We? We’ll move?”
“Of course. You’re my daughter. A mother would never think of abandoning her child unless the mother’s very soul was under mortal threat of eternal damnation. We’ll go together as soon as I make the rest of the arrangements.”
As calmly as I could, I asked, “ ‘The rest’? What, uh, ‘arrangements’ have you already made?”
“The usual. Finances, assets, shedding all the unnecessary complications of the modern world.”
I felt sick but had to go on, had to get the answers. “So what happened to all these unnecessary complications?”
“The brethren are handling all of that. All of my finances and such.”
“Your finances?” Panic crept into my voice. “You turned our money over to those people?”
My mother clicked back into full android mode as she parroted Scripture at me. “ ‘For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.’ ”
“What are you saying? Those men, those brethren, aren’t your husband. You don’t have a—” I stopped myself.
“They are my brothers in Christ. You have never understood that. Never even tried. I put up with your willfulness, your lack of respect while your father was alive.” The pink fragility that had encased my mother for as long as I could remember was gone. Self-righteousness pumped through her like steroids, giving her new muscles of determination and will. “I endured your abuse for his sake.”
“Abuse? You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re joking.”
She wasn’t listening to me. “For his sake, I allowed a friendship that has corrupted you to continue.”
“Didi? Didi corrupted me? Didi saved me.”
“This is my fault. I blame myself. You are lost. Unruly and spoiled children are among the most miserable of children. They are not the blessings that the Bible says they should be to parents. ‘Withhold not discipline from the child, for if you strike and punish him with the rod, he will not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.’ It was your father’s decision to raise you without boundaries and I was subject to him in everything.”
“This is insane. ‘Subject?’ You were ‘subject’ to Daddy? Daddy and I spent our entire lives tiptoeing around you and living in fear of your nervous fits and depressions and migraines—”
“It’s true. I was lost. Lost without the light of Christ’s love in my life just as you are lost. Just as you will always be lost unless you are consecrated. You can’t understand now. Your heart is closed. You will never live a Christ-filled life until we get you away from bad influences. Until we are living in HomeTown.”
“I can’t talk about this anymore. I have to go.”
“You’re going to her, aren’t you?”
Something in my mother’s tone gave me the creeps. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You people, so smart and witty. We’ll see how smart and witty you are on Judgment Day.”
“ ‘You people’? I’m your daughter.”
“Then honor thy mother!” She was starting to lose her HeartLand android cool. She’d balled her hands into tiny fists and was drawing them up toward her ears where they would vibrate in one of the nervous fits that had controlled Daddy and me for my whole life. For a second I was lost, ready to collapse in a sobbing blob. But Didi’s voice spoke in my head telling me that if I caved in, I’d end up in Hookworm, Georgia, with a doily on my head.
“You want me to honor you as a mother? Then start acting like one!” For one second, she was so stunned by the sound of my raised voice that her fists dropped and she fell silent. “Start acting like you care about me! About my life, my future. You want to abandon me for that cult, just say it. Say it!”
All the toughness that lurked behind her baby-doll prettiness gathered itself up. “I have made provisions for you to come with me provided you accept the discipline of the brethren.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you will renounce Satan and live a good Christian life.”
“I don’t have to renounce Satan. I do live a good Christian life and I am going to leave now because there is no point in talking to you.” I slammed out of the house because I hated her so much at that moment I wanted to squash her puffy, bratty face in. Worse, the X-Acto knife in my hand had started to tingle. I ran all the way to Didi’s house.
When I got there, she was in a pissy mood, PMSing wildly. Even though our cycles were synched up, she was the only one ever allowed to have PMS. She was playing the Strokes so loud it made my bones ache. I knew she wanted me to tell her to turn it down so she could bitch me out, but I’d had enough of being screamed at by crazy women for one day. Of course, she hadn’t done anything on our group project, the scale model of the Temple of Dio
nysus and Altar of Zeus. So I just got out the foam board and graph paper and started making a pattern. Even though Mith Myth would never know the difference, I did a long series of calculations to translate the altar’s original dimensions into a perfect scale rendering. I did it to keep the fidgety numbers synapses in my brain occupied. To block out Didi, my mother, HeartLand, everything.
After about an hour, Didi turned down the Strokes and started sniffing around the temple like a curious woodland creature. She decided we needed to cover the temple in a mosaic and started smashing up Catwoman’s old liquor bottles. She sorted through the green, blue, and brown shards to find the perfect chips and slivers.
Didi liked ancient civ since she took all the doings on Mount Olympus as a sort of template for what life at the top was going to be like for her when she arrived. Zeus, Jupiter, Steven Tyler, Julian Casablancas. They were all the same in her book. Gods were gods as far as she was concerned.
Didi got so into the project that after we finished the temple and altar, she made tiny Sculpey sculptures of Apollo, Zeus, Athena, and Callisto, along with some satyrs and centaurs. We baked them in the oven and the house filled with the smell of burning plastic. It was four in the morning when we finally finished and went to bed.
I’d forgotten it was Easter until Didi woke me up and sent me to the backyard where she’d hidden speckled eggs and malted milk balls. It was more fun than you would have thought finding candy tucked into chinks in the patio wall, under the toe of the garden gnome, balanced on the limb of a desert willow. But that was Didi’s gift. When she wanted to, she could turn anything into a party.
After we finished gluing the last pieces of glass onto the temple, Didi drove me home. The desert willow tree that had been a twig when we’d moved in had grown into a taller twig that had sprouted a fluff of lilac blossoms. A few lilac petals were scattered across the brick red lava rocks. Random stuff was strewn on top of the petals: my CD player, a couple of spaghetti-strap tops, the Swollen Members CD Didi had burned for me, my makeup kit, all the old copies of Raw, Spin, and Crud that Didi had passed along. Even a package of Summer’s Eve douche and my Lady Epilator.
Didi surveyed the scene and figured out what it meant before I could. “Wow, an official wig snap.” She nodded at the church van parked on the street. “Obviously, she needed her brethren and sistern around to do something like this.”
I tried to open the front door, but it was locked. “Mom? Mom! Mom, are you in there! Could you open the door, please?”
Finally, the door opened. Mom stood there, not saying a word, backed up by half a dozen sisters and brothers, all in their best pioneer Easter finery. Even the pastor was there, his broad shoulders blocking the doorway.
The sight of them all there arrayed against me rattled me so much that my thoughts zoomed immediately to what I’d feared the most for so long that I almost asked, “What’s wrong? Is something wrong with Daddy?” Then I remembered.
No one spoke. No one budged. They had obviously rehearsed this whole thing. It was a sort of intervention on my mother’s behalf. She finally spoke. “In case you hadn’t noticed, today is Easter. The day we celebrate the resurrection of the living Christ.”
The pastor put his hand on my mother’s shoulder and she touched it in a way that made me aware that she was the prettiest of the sistern. There was no wedding ring on the pastor’s hand. He gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze and she went on. “As your mother, I have to love you enough to save you. God did not bless me with a child to”—she glanced at the pastor, who nodded for her to go on with the approved message—“populate hell!”
The others nodded and muttered, “Amen.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Go on, sister,” the pastor prodded.
My mother gathered herself up like a child in a Christmas pageant about to recite her piece. “ ‘A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ I have left you too long to yourself and you have brought me to shame.”
“Don’t blame yourself, sister,” the pastor said in his ultra manly rumbling voice. “God had two children in Eden and they both made wrong choices.”
The others chuckled with nervous relief, then stiffened their spines again.
“Thank you, brother, but this is my fault and my responsibility to change.” My mother turned to me. “My brothers and sisters have helped me to cast out those things that are abhorrent in the sight of the Lord and they stand beside me today as I fight to reclaim the soul of my child.”
“Mom, my soul isn’t lost so it doesn’t need to be reclaimed.”
“We knew you would say that, for Satan is a powerful deceiver.” She glared at Didi and added, “And his agents are even more devious.”
Didi’s head started weaving from side to side like the black girls at school when they fought. That’s how she sounded when she got up into my mother’s face. “Uh-uh, bitch, I did not just hear you call me an agent of Satan!”
The sistern gasped as if they lived in a world where every other word wasn’t bitch. My mom’s eyes glittered with self-righteous vindication since Didi had just demonstrated for all the other androids how impossibly hard her life as a parent was.
The pastor’s voice boomed out. “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
Didi snorted, “Oh, that’s a big fucking tragedy. Like Rae and I would even want to spend eternity with a bunch of hypocritical, self-righteous, intolerant assholes like you. Give me the fornicators and idolators any day.”
The pastor took his arm from my mother’s shoulder, stepped in front, and squared off with Didi, glaring at her until the tendons in his neck jumped out as he thundered, “ ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them!’ ”
Didi squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, laughing as if the pastor had just made a joke. “Did you just call me gay?” She looked at me. “He thinks I’m gay. God, that’s funny. Probably projecting, right? You got a secret boyfriend, pastor? Is that it? Little boys maybe? You guys do altar boys? Is that your deal? You like little boys?”
The pastor turned solid in front of my eyes, filling up with bottled rage until he was a slab of marble who intoned, “ ‘And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.’ ”
He scared me. Didi just shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.” She turned from him and, already crunching across the rocks, asked me, “Rae, you coming?”
I glanced at my mother, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze. She wailed and pretended to be heartbroken when I walked away with Didi. “Come back! Do not choose the path of iniquity for I will do anything for you but abandon my lord and Christ, Jesus. You are giving me no choice.”
We both knew that what I was giving her was a way to do exactly what she wanted: run off to HeartLand without looking like a bad mother in front of her cult friends. It was my Easter present to her and it showed how endlessly ridiculous the human heart is because, even after everything, I was still crushed that she took it. That she chose those strangers over me.
While the sisters and brothers prayed and the pastor boomed out another Bible quote, “ ‘Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations,’ ” Didi and I crammed as much of my stuff as we could grab into her trunk. Didi flipped the HeartLanders a giant bird and cackled wildly as we drove away. I was laughing with her when the glee caught in my throat and turned into sobs.
“Rae-rae, baby, don’t stress. You lost her a long time ago.”
“But why does she hate me? What did I ever do to make her hate me?�
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“It’s not you. She’s, you know, troubled. Some people just weren’t meant to be mothers and you and I got two prime candidates.”
I tried to stop crying, but my life seemed ruined and meaningless and utterly ridiculous. I felt arbitrary and unnecessary. Someone a mother could leave with only some Bible verses and a few fake tears.
“ ‘Children are for the motherly,’ that’s what Brecht says. Anyway, nothing we can do about it. I know you think we’re friends because of our dads, but it’s all about the moms. Face it, at this point neither one of us, technically, has ’rents. We have each other.”
When Didi said, “We have each other,” my heart filled my chest in a way that convinced me the pastor was probably right, I was a total lez. I slid a glance at Didi. She had on a white angora top that looked like cottonwood fluff floating on a pool of syrup against her dark skin. Did mom see something that I was hiding from myself? Is that why I had zero interest in the few guys who’d asked me out? Rodney Tatum, who occasionally worked the late shift at the Pup, had asked me to the state fair rodeo to see his sister ride in the barrel-racing finals and I’d turned him down flat. No, lesbian, straight, extraterrestrial, whatever I was, I don’t think Rodney and I would have hooked up. Michael Debont? He’d asked me to Homecoming. But everyone except Michael knew he was gay. Was that a sign? Was I broadcasting my essence while being too blind to see it myself?
It was true, I wasn’t attracted to the handful of loser guys who’d asked me out. I couldn’t imagine choosing to be with any of the boys I knew over being anywhere with Didi. Didi dug a roach out of the ashtray and tried to light it and drive with the palms of her hands while I wondered if I was a lesbian. It was better than thinking about Mom. I was doing what Didi ordered; I was staying distracted.
Didi sucked in a lungful, then squinted at me while she held the smoke in, and said, “What?” inhaling the word so she sounded like a robot.
“What what?”
Didi exhaled, coughing. “That is some harsh bammer.”
