Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  “Ashley is going to be at this party,” I explained to him. “This is my big chance.”

  “Your big chance to be cool, huh?” He smirked. I nodded, liking the way Kyle smiled at me. It made me feel lucky. I watched as he put his clothes by the washing machine, wondering how he’d managed to soak up all the fairy juice from Mom’s womb. It was kind of unfair. What about what my bone structure had needed?

  “This may be my last chance,” I told him solemnly.

  “Well, good luck,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, hoping I’d be one of his kind by night’s end. I put on the turtleneck and V-neck sweater that I’d laid out days before—it was an exact replica of the ensemble Ashley had worn the previous Friday. It was totally safe.

  Mom dropped me off at the party. With a ladylike but suave air, I entered, ready for the prepubescent Miss Universe. I was quiet and appealing. I said hello to Cortney’s mom in the kitchen and presented my submissiveness to the cool girls by averting my eyes. I couldn’t believe we were all in the same room together. Hanging out. Eating the same chips. At your service, m’lady, said my meticulous outfit and nonthreatening body language. But when I made a sudden movement to exhale, they evacuated, as if sensing TB.

  “C’mon,” they said to each other. “Let’s go in here.”

  The alphas settled on some boring board game in the living room, possibly because a four-player limit provided just the right amount of hierarchical exclusion, or maybe because their coolness had simply matured beyond stupid things, like having fun. Amazed at their level of self-control and complete lack of imagination, I receded, my faux confidence thinning, into the wallpaper. Maybe they just needed a minute, and then I could play. That was cool. No pressure. All relationships needed a little space. I understood.

  I would’ve prolonged the act, but then Margaret showed up. At first we stood side by side, calm and collected, just keeping it real. But as soon as our eyes locked, I lost my bearings and breathed. Then, I let down my mullet.

  I grabbed her by the hand and led her up to Cortney’s room where I’d spied a tangled pile of Barbies. Margaret’s face lit up, my beloved and willing accomplice to all things stupid.

  I picked up a headless doll, my first impulse being of course to find her head and brush her hair. My second being to terrorize the room with her splayed legs.

  “Cortney!” I called out, bobbing Barbie in the air. “Come here!”

  I wasn’t all that friendly with the birthday girl, but I knew her well enough to know she wasn’t snobby. I could actually make her laugh in a good way.

  Cortney padded up the stairs and popped her head in her room.

  “Oh.” She laughed shyly. “Aren’t those so dumb? I hate them.”

  “Yeah totally,” I echoed, fishing out a Ken doll whose butt had been desecrated with brown marker. “But look! This one pooped itself!”

  “Ew, nasty.” Cortney giggled.

  At one end of her house was popularity, on the other side poop. She seemed slightly torn between the two. I wondered what would happen if Margaret and I could seduce her, win her to the dark side. Wouldn’t that make us the popular ones? Wouldn’t the crew downstairs be so jealous?

  It seemed like a good Plan B, so to woo her I unleashed a battle cry and chucked Dysentery Ken at Margaret, who screamed and threw it back at me, missing my head but knocking over a radio on the desk behind me. Cortney laughed anyway. Green light.

  I lobbed Ken down the hall and over the staircase, where he continued to smile broadly as his rigid body somersaulted, toppling framed portraits in the front hallway. I ran to claim him and Margaret bounded down after me, wielding what looked to be Placidyl Overdose Barbie. For a minute we stood in a standoff, heaving and cackling, the pinwheeling plastic arms of our dolls daring the other to make the first move.

  Then Cortney called from upstairs before dropping a few Barbie heads on us, not unlike a mortar attack. Margaret saw her chance and lurched, but I smacked at her with Ken’s rock-hard buttocks, then ran toward the closest route of escape, which of course was the living room where the cool girls had clotted.

  Margaret ran in after me, screaming something about Ken’s tiny weiner.

  I was out of control, waving his dirty little neutered crotch bump around like a ninja sword, inexplicably compelled to violate their international airspace. Maybe I thought they’d enjoy Cholera Ken, maybe I thought they’d be open to pointers, maybe I thought they’d be jealous and join in. Maybe I thought God was on my side. But if He was, He hadn’t properly equipped me to battle the deadly force of their rolling eyes. Cringing under the weight of their whispering stares I was rendered mute, thinking suddenly about how dumb my hair looked. I touched my cheek, finding a dribble of spit on my chin, proof that my role as Unwanted was somehow predetermined, inescapable. Margaret stood defiantly, waiting for me to continue the game, but I was wavering, shrinking, patting down my hair with my free hand as my laugh trailed off into nervous silence.

  “Who invited her?” muttered one of the cool girls. She was tan with dark wavy hair.

  Ashley responded with a benevolent little shrug. She didn’t have to talk smack. She had minions for that.

  “Why are you guys playing with Barbies?” Ellie asked. “Are you like three years old?”

  “Oh, my God,” said another, “that is so mean.” And the group giggled fiercely.

  I walked out as if I hadn’t heard it, but my rump was steaming from the cattle branding. How could I be so immature, so shortsighted, being myself when my future was at stake? Who does that?

  It was over now. I was done. It was too late.

  Riding home that night, I watched the quaint houses roll by my car window, the antique Colonials and classic Capes. I imagined all the popular mothers standing at their kitchen islands, admiring their popular offspring under their warm, recessed lighting. They’d chat on the phone about their group vaycay at Mt. Killington. The field hockey bags were packed and waiting by the front door. Everything in their life was going as planned.

  Who invited her? they’d said. I slapped my forehead into my hands, trying to block out the searing playback. If only I was pretty. If only I didn’t have such stupid, stupid hair.

  Every time the light shifted, I could see my silhouette reflected in the car window, each one confirming what they must have seen. I locked in on that signal and fell in sync. At least that way I could understand. At least that way it all made sense. I am ugly, I am ugly, I am ugly.

  By Monday morning I wasn’t quite so depressed. I felt cheeky again, happy to see my dorky friends. At the town fair, my grandma had let me pick out a new red sweatshirt to match my red moon boots. It had LIFE’S A BEACH printed in huge black caps on the front. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, and neither did Grandma, but I liked that it seemed ironic. In it, I could skulk past the ski set as a revolutionary.

  Look, you snobs, my sweatshirt would say. Today I’ve decided that I can never be like you.

  But by Thursday, I’d have on whatever Ashley had on, and by week’s end, my solitary thought was, if only I could, if only I could.

  4 | Church of Christ Barbie

  “I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God.”

  —1 TIMOTHY 3:14

  He was the Englishman in New York yearning to find the meaning of life. She was the all-American girl on a mission to spread the Good News. To God, Mom and Dad must have looked like the hot and cold side of a divine McDLT.

  Mom had just graduated with honors from Bible college in Tennessee when she packed her suitcase for the Big Apple. That way she could kill two birds—gettin’ into heaven and gettin’ outta Dodge—and cast only one dainty little Christian stone.

  Dad had just arrived in Manhattan from Great Britain when he glimpsed her up onstage at the ’64 World’s Fair. She was giving an instructional demonstration for her encapsulated paper company, wearing
her encapsulating black skirt and ridiculously pointed sweater. With her magazine-caliber smile and Amazon hips, Mom was the flesh-and-blood version of Dad’s first American love, the ’57 Chevy. Oh yeah, Jesus knew what He was doing all right. Before long, Dad was on the fast track to baptism and proclaiming the Bible as the one true doctrine.

  In the beginning, God created Texas. And this is where Mom and Dad, like all zealous Christians, began their journey. Undaunted, Dad added Southern drawl to his long list of fluent languages and learned to take tea alone. Though they couldn’t understand a word he said, his accent encouraged the locals, who believed it was evidence that God’s World Domination Tour was in full swing. Soon all of pagan-infested Europe would be swarming into Abilene, begging for a hit of the Good News.

  Dad had liked Church of Christ in Texas because it was a big deal. It was a dress-up affair. It was pancake makeup and grand scale and stained glass, cathedrals with polished pews and tall, good-looking preachers who inspired and commanded respect.

  But in Connecticut, not so much.

  Twenty years later, Dad found himself staring down the barrel of our new church home, or what Dad called a makeshift cattle manger. The New England outposts of the Church of Christ never had enough money to buy a real building. Instead, they prayed every week that God would help us build one. In Connecticut, we drove thirty minutes three times a week to worship in the local community center, a stale, dreary gray room with movable partitions and scuffed plastic tables. It had no glass, and the only thing stained were the sagging panels of fluorescent lighting.

  We didn’t have real pastors, either, just pastors in training. Young, short and pudgy, they had the sexless, ageless white cheeks and soft hands required of all young Southern Bible college grads. Our slushy gray New England springs and Jewish demographic were a kind of hazing for these budding evangelists. It was believed that an extended mission trip spent hacking at the spiritually infertile soil of the Northeast would make men of them in no time.

  When their preaching tour of duty ended, they were given the green light to return to Tennessee, praise Jesus, and a Farewell Fellowship potluck where they’d praise God for our good fortune and tell us how much we’d be blessed by the incoming pastor. Then they’d pack their bags in the middle of the night and flee like fugitives back down into the humid and welcoming pants of the Bible Belt, which gladly loosened a notch as they returned. Down South, the crops for Christ’s kingdom were ripe ’n’ ready and there were no permits needed to bulldoze. God could have an animated billboard and a sprawling compound with a gleaming white mega-steeple and a massive parking lot that rippled in the heat.

  Pastor Pudge, the new reinforcement from our mother church in Dixie, was shorter, happier, and with thicker glasses. Perhaps to help blind him to reality. He was bolstered by a stern-looking wife who left a chill in the front row. Presumably he’d just met her in Bible college, though she looked to be about forty-seven. The joy of knowing the Lord does not always make us more “happy.” Behind her pursed mouth, steely eyes and helmet of curls, she was no doubt sizing up her husband as he preached, planning ways to make his haircut more and more like their toddler’s. I imagined she had a twisted side, that she drew sad faces on her kitchen serving spoons, each a worse level of spanking, such as medium, hard, and Mr. Extra-Naughty.

  Much to Dad’s additional chagrin, Connecticut Church of Christers did not dress up for church. They patted down their greasy bed head or wore a ball cap, if you were lucky. In a room fraught with comfy tennis shoes and baggy sweats, Mom, Kate, and I stuck out like sore thumbs in our floral print department store dresses and panty hose. Kyle had on the shoes he wore to junior prom, and Dad of course was trimmed with cuff links and shoe polish, his jet-black hair side parted and sprayed into a surfboard. People watched us pull out of the parking lot with deadpan faces. We knew what they were thinking: can’t take that Acura through the eye of the needle.

  By way of explanation, Dad would remind us, his American kids, that Americans were a bloody sloppy people, and also slovenly, slothy, silty and slitty, and deserving of every sl- word in a ranting Englishman’s vocabulary.

  Dad was the antithesis of slovenly. He’d been raised in Peru by gorgeous, ample-busted amas who tidied and cooked and took care of him so Dad’s British parents could have more time dedicated to Not Being Sloppy. On top of that, Dad’s formative years were spent shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic to English boarding schools where sloppiness was punishable by death. The point being, Dad was hardwired to dress for success. Casual Fridays at work were psychologically painful for him. And as for us ladies, a cross between a Latina-esque June Cleaver and Stewardess Barbie was the unspoken template.

  So at the bottom of the stairs before church, he’d perform fashion triage as we descended, ready to pop the loaded question.

  “You’re going to wear that?” he’d ask as Mom glided down in a pair of orthopedic sandals with ultra-arch support.

  “What?”

  “Those shoes?”

  “Yes. I am. What!”

  He was forever trying to get her to warm up to the idea of four-inch heels as casual wear. A frilly push-up bra and a plunging neckline that, Dad insisted, could be worn while one stirred Rice-A-Roni and spot-treating poop stains.

  “Sorry, but they’re just not comfortable,” she told him.

  “What’s wrong with these?” he asked, digging out the shiny red patent-leather steel-tipped stilettos he’d gotten her for Christmas.

  “They pinch my toes.”

  My dad would look for one of us kids, shaking his head. “‘They pinch my toes.’ I knew that was coming.”

  Mom was queen of comfort. If it was soft and elastic, it didn’t matter that the cat had once given birth on it in the garage. Somebody would lob some socks in the trash and she would fish them out, indignant. “Hey! I can still wear those!”

  My dad would bring out a Liz Claiborne miniskirt, tags dangling.

  “I’ll freeze,” Mom scolded.

  “What about this?” He draped a low-cut black camisole over his arm, now in its fifth year behind dry-cleaning bags. “Man alive, this is what we need!”

  “Oh, don’t take it out, you’ll mess it up.”

  “Wear it to church.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Why not? Of course you can.”

  “My boobs’ll fall out.”

  “At last!” Then he’d sing his favorite church hymn: “Oh, Why Not Tonight?”

  Dad would always lose the fashion war with mom, but Kate and I were open to pointers.

  When I presented myself with African-patterned MC Hammer parachute pants and bangs sprayed into a small wedding-cake figurine, he’d ask, in an objective way, “You’re going like that, ah?”

  “What?” I would say, reading his expression. Could he not appreciate the many modern uses of polyester-rayon blends? The panel of mirrors in the foyer each reflected a small slice of my head. I shadowboxed back and forth to piece together a solid first impression.

  “Oh, brother.” That was Dad’s telltale sound, a verbal British backhand that came down on the first syllable: BRO-ther. Panned.

  I’d opt for something more demure, which was another of Dad’s favorite words, and slip a compact into my Bible, so between hymns I could spot-check to see if the humidity had ruined my chances of being chosen as Abraham’s concubine. We’re all beautiful in God’s eyes. Yeah, whatever. That’s probably what every slovenly American tourist was telling herself right now, traipsing around Big Ben with a camera and a Big Mac dribbled across her opposing plaids. I may be American, but I sure as hell was not going to be a bloody one.

  Kate knew the routine. We shared the same bathroom, mobbed the same wall socket with our own lucky curling irons. We primped ourselves side by side, united in our failure to become Christy Turlington.

  “Why are you so ugly?” she asked her face, wielding the brush like a threat. I wondered if I should defend her reflection, out of Christ
ian kindness. But I was too busy thinking the same thing about my own face, and watching the clock.

  “We’re gonna be late for church!” Dad roared from downstairs. “Get in the car!” Which of course wasn’t carrr but cah.

  Being ten minutes late for church was our family’s least favorite activity, and so we did it every week, sometimes more than once.

  The good thing was, I could always count on Kate to suddenly crack under all the pressure and make me pee my pants laughing.

  At church, we’d start to lose our demure right about when Dick, the elderly song leader and also a walking stereotype for Memphis, Tennessee, came up to the podium in his lime green suit to lead us in yet another abysmal tent revival throwback. He’d blow into his tuning harmonica, sing the wrong note, and I’d leer at Kate, who would then tuck her head and rub her eyes to keep from sputtering. Mom would prickle and flash us the first of many warning looks.

  Singing became so funny to us because it was supposed to be so serious and so good, and yet it was always so very, very bad. Sometimes this made Dick so upset that he’d make the congregation sing the dang song twice, this time louder and with feeling, as if praising God was supposed to sound like a boys’ choir tweaking on meth. Singing was especially critical because there weren’t any instruments allowed to cover up our barfy mediocrity. And that was because, along with abstinence from alcohol, dancing, rock and roll, pop culture, shorts, swearing, oh-my-God-ing, tank tops, mixed bathing, and of course premarital anything, Church of Christ was determined also to practice “safe hymns.” That is, musical instruments were banned during praise making. Apparently the only thing that pissed Christ off more than an instrument was a beat. Dick was allowed to keep time only by conducting in the air with his right hand. But because of arthritis, Dick could not conduct. He could only stroke his cupped hand up and down in the air, not the least bit self-conscious as he pantomimed the universal sign for jerking off each and every Sunday.