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

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  I pretended to cough and Kate gasped into a tissue.

  Watch it, Mom’s face said. She pressed her finger on my leg, where it left a little white circle.

  “What? I’m blowing my nose,” Kate whispered.

  And then Dick tried to make vibrato on a high note and failed, so I dug my fingernails into my arm and stared hard at the floor, desperately trying to block it out, because I knew that once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Finally the song ended and everybody deflated into their seats, pushing their unwelcome perfume around.

  “Please turn to song number one twinny-fahve,” said Dick. “One. Twinny-fahve.”

  By the time Dick had finished raping innocent numbers with his accent, and we had finally slogged through five verses about a lamb being quartered and strewn on a bloody cross, I was starving for the Lord’s Supper. Which sadly wasn’t a supper at all but an unsatisfying tease of a snack, during which the congregation was ironically urged to imagine Jesus’s body as a food source.

  “This is my flesh,” said the Communion leader, as if he was our personal savior. “Take it in remembrance of me.”

  By the time the shiny aluminum tray with the little paper doily came down my row, my stomach was rolling and growling, starving for some of that delicious, dry, crunchy flesh. However, it was uncouth to fill up on too much Christ cracker. You were to break off only a teensy corner and nibble it into a wad of paste in your mouth, listening to all the crackly pinching and wet chewing in all the rows of hungry, masticating mouths. I closed my eyes and imagined Jesus hanging on the cross. I wanted to be sad, but His legs were roughly the creamy golden shade of a lightly baked pretzel.

  “The Roman soldiers whipped and spit upon Him,” the leader was saying.

  Whipped and spit, my brain echoed as I pinched off a hunk and bowed my head to chew. Whip and spit, spit and whip.

  I tried to focus.

  Imagine getting nailed through the feet. And stabbed through the hands. Ugh, so UNFAIR.

  I popped my finger in my mouth to get a piece of remembrance out from behind my back molar.

  Then the Men in Charge of the Trays gathered them up and lined up at the back of the room. Then they marched to the front like a squadron of solemn waiters and began to stack the trays. Then they unstacked some other trays and restacked some new ones. As the senseless stacking continued unabated, the red minute hand crawled past the black dashes on the wall clock by the exit sign. Four… five… six. It was seriously unreal how long sixty seconds truly was.

  “Dear Lord,” prayed the Communion leader, “please bless us Father, as we drink the fruit of the vine. We’re so thankful that, as we drink your son’s blood, all of our sins are washed away.”

  When it came to God’s dying son, Christians had a lot of options. You could drink His blood for forgiveness, you could wash your cares in it, you could use it to get stains out of a load of whites, you could even redeem it like a rebate offer and get 100 percent off the price of your sins. I’d been listening to these catchphrases for so long that I no longer noticed that they didn’t make any sense. The only thing that bothered me was that men got to do all the praying. And their prayers were about as inspiring as a sack of turds. What would I say, I daydreamed, if I could lead a prayer? So many possibilities. It would be like getting a part in the play every week—without even auditioning. But only men got to pray and preach. Men were the heads of the household, the leaders of the church, God’s favorites, and even their useless, stinking sack o’ turds was more pleasing to God. A woman should never be caught dead flapping her yapper anywhere near the pulpit, unless she savored the thought of an extra-crispy afterlife.

  So I waited for him to get to inJesusnamewepray, which meant his overpraying was almost complete, thank God, and I was one step closer to sucking down my little cup of Welch’s Grape Juice. It was roughly the same color as the deoxygenated blood that must have poured from Christ’s puncture wounds. It reminded me of the hymn about splashing in a crimson fountain, only this one was sweeter and much grapier. But it clung to your teeth and left a nasty aroma in everyone’s breath.

  Then came the trays for the money, and I pulled out my stick of Dentyne like an after-dinner mint, while Mom handed me a dollar to throw in, like a wishing well that would one day magically spit out a new church building.

  The prayer leader stood to provide an outline of what his prayer would include, and a reminder that there would be several more prayers before the closing prayer, which cued the beginning of the prayers for the sermon, and then the third prayer before the last five prayers to usher in the final prayer, which would be a brief sum-up of the previous seven prayers, with each prayer lasting about as long as a string of commercials, only with no good show to return to.

  “Bow your heads,” said the Communion leader.

  Sweet Jesus. Church hadn’t even started yet.

  The only thing it was okay for a kid to play with during Sunday service was, of course, the Bible. I played with its ribbon bookmarker, did pencil rubbings of the fake leather binding, and when things got really dull, even tried to read it. To my surprise, reading it was actually the best idea ever, since nobody bothered to censor the Old Testament. I always thought that God’s word was pure. But what child rape scene doesn’t sound righteous and pure when peppered with thy and dost? The dull drone of any given sermon slipped away as I read, growing closer to the darker side of the Lord our Savior.

  Men murdered for their foreskins, women stoned for whoredom and their infants cut into fillets, girl children distributed for postbattle deflowering, prostitutes hacked into symbolic pieces and sent via Ye Olde Parcel Post to all thy neighboring tribes, breasts leaping like gazelles and lovers’ loins shining like apples.

  Then suddenly, God would just materialize and throw you in a half nelson. There was nothing you could do about it except kill whichever people He asked you to, or else your crops, your sheep, and your pecker would wither up and die of some accursed plague.

  But—do what He says, and oh, there would be more knowing and taking and begetting of virgins than you could ever dream of, guaranteed.

  God always blessed his favorite men with tawdry delights, like a thousand underaged sex slaves, whom I imagined cavorting nude but for brass nipple covers, strumming crotch lyres, and dribbling cream from their overflowing flagons. Surely, if Noah could have incestuous orgies in his tent, then I, your average suburban child, could long to be groped by a boy’s sweaty hand and still escape the wrath of God. I wasn’t going to do something stupid, like behead my brother. How idiotically Old Testament.

  At the completion of the sermon two hours later, I was transported back to the present day and shuttled with the other young folks to Sunday school for an additional hour of propaganda, followed by forty-five minutes of “fellowship” and finally an hour of putting away folding chairs. By the time we escaped back outside to fresh air, the weekend was gone and evening service was soon to follow. Beyond that, Monday morning and school awaited like an executioner.

  “I want you to take this rose, children,” our youth group leader said to our Sunday school class. “I want you to pass this rose around, feel free to smell it, touch the petals, do whatever you like with it. Just enjoy the rose.”

  There were six kids, four boys plus me and Kate. It was highly suspicious, being asked to enjoy anything.

  By the time the rose had passed through a few sets of fingers it was a bit limp, with a loose petal or two, but still in good shape. The Communion cracker, by comparison, looked far worse after being pressed and pinched by our entire congregation. And it was still holy.

  “Now I want to ask you,” he said with a gleam in his eye, reaching into a plastic Quik-e-Mart bag and retrieving another rose. His receipt dropped on the floor by his chair. “Which rose would you like me to give you now?”

  “Not that one,” said one boy, predictably. “It’s got every-one’s germs on it.”

  “Exactly,” said our B
ible teacher, pleased that today’s vague metaphor was going so well. I will lead thee through the lust-ridden manholes of thy adolescence, he was thinking, and still make it to the Abdows’ buffet by four o’clock.

  “Now, when you pick your mate in life, or maybe even someone you want to go steady with, think about this: Do you want the rose that’s been passed around a couple times? Or the fresh, untouched rose?”

  Go steady. As if hope chests and knee pants were still possible. In our Bible class manual titled “Pigtails to Wedding Bells,” it explained how slow dancing, along with common sense and heavy petting, defiled God’s temple.

  Heavy petting, I repeated to myself. Heavy petting. Heavy petting. Whatever it was, it had to be good. Was it like rubbing your dog’s belly, only with more force, and on a boy, while French kissing? Was there light petting? What about straddling, grinding, and kneading?

  I summed up the two stems, wishing I could make myself want the poor rose that had been nosed around, but didn’t. Nope. I was just another sellout who kinda wanted a fresh rose.

  “Can boys be roses too?” I asked aloud.

  Our teacher opened his mouth to answer and got stuck, decided to chuckle.

  “Sure they can,” he said, and I knew right away boys had nothing to worry about. Duh: God liked war, red meat, and intact hymens. He built the entire universe and didn’t wear no panties.

  “I have another question,” I said, not knowing what I was going to say. I was just mad. “Sometimes I… I dance with my stuffed animals.”

  The boys snickered. Our Bible teacher took comfort in the laughter.

  “Do what?”

  I looked back, enjoying his confusion.

  “You’re asking me about dancing? I’m, uh…”

  “She dances with her dolls,” said a boy, snorting.

  “A male stuffed animal,” I corrected.

  “Are you even old enough to be in this class?” asked one of the boys.

  “I just want the rules,” I said. The teacher sent an appealing look to his supporters.

  “Yeah, but this is really for serious discussion. If you want to talk about teddy bears, I mean, look. Maybe you should be back with the five-year-olds next door.”

  But I wasn’t going to leave it at that. He couldn’t suspend me. This wasn’t a real class, and this wasn’t even his real job. So on Wednesday night I came to Bible class with a pad and pen, a reporter doing an exposé of half-assed Sunday school teachers who couldn’t back up their dogma.

  I raised my hand and asked about Ken kissing and touching my Marie Osmond Barbie when she had her bathing suit off. They weren’t married yet, but they really loved each other, and you know, it was special. What does God think about that kind of petting?

  Teacher didn’t even answer me. He went right on talking about the apostle Paul but told me later I was being rude and immature. I was soundly demoted back to the younger class where I would review the art of shutting up and this-I-knowing about how much Jesus loved me.

  I found Mom after adult Bible class was over, still seated in her row of folding chairs, rummaging through her purse. I sat down next to her.

  “They’re sending me back to the kiddie class.”

  “I thought they moved you up with the teens,” she said, pulling out her checkbook.

  “They did,” I said.

  Mom started writing a check, folding the corner of a paper over the top as a cover sheet. She did that because God doesn’t want others to know how much your tithe works out to. That would be tacky, like leaving the price tag on your gift. It was not a gift, anyway, but an offering, like a goat you carry on your shoulders to Jerusalem, only with a routing number at the bottom. I caught a flash of several provocative 0s before she folded it in half.

  “But I told the teacher,” I said, “that I danced. With my stuffed animals.”

  “Oh, you didn’t.” She smirked. “Now that’s bad.”

  I could tell she meant the good kind of bad. On the drive home from the community center, I always took my cues from the front seat.

  “What’d you think of the sermon?” I’d ask Dad, baiting.

  “Don’t get me started,” he’d growl.

  “Honestly,” echoed Mom, pushing her hair off her face. “You think they’d come up with something new. Ridiculous.”

  My eyes gleamed.

  Sure, they kept us going through the tiring motions three times a week. But little glimmers of skepticism kept my hope alive. It was clear that no question was too stupid, and no answer very sacred.

  That being said, my stupid questions persisted. Reams of sinful but romantic deeds were still completely unclassifiable. Like, what if you and your Christian boyfriend are the last two people left on Earth after a nuclear war, and no one can marry you, but you have to repopulate Earth? Getting naked and having fornication over and over, whatever that was, would be okay then. Right? And if that was okay, the door swung wide to all kinds of other possibilities. But I couldn’t pose sexual scenarios to Mom. And as for these desk clerks running God’s bureaucracy? Forget it. They had no imagination whatsoever.

  So I explained things to myself like this. God was like the most fair-minded dude in the universe. He would see a problem from every side. He considered not just your actions but also your intentions, your thoughts, He calculated into a divine formula your background, the intensity of your desire, the equation of your entire soul. But none of that really mattered anyway because when He looked at you He would just see love, because God is love, right? And as the embodiment of love, He’d never give girls and boys different, unequal rules because that would render Him unjust and imperfect and unloving. And that was impossible.

  At home, I brushed Twirly Curl Barbie’s blond hair. She was so tan and hard and unchanging. Like God, she too was perfect. Strange.

  I splayed her movable legs and straddled her on the Bionic Man’s lap, twisting her articulatable wrist around his head. She had no future groom to please. There was no limit to how many times her petals could be sniffed or her bud ravaged.

  Feel me down there, she whispered. Feel me with your bionic hands. He wanted to very much, but his appendages didn’t bend, so he had to step back and pet her at arm’s length like some big grinning dummy. Watching him helped me relax somehow.

  Oh, yes, Barbie sighed. That’s right.

  Ken tapped his hand against the hard axis under her skirt, right over her painted-on underwear. Sometimes I wished I were made of plastic too. If I was plastic, I wouldn’t have to get ready for evening church because my perfection would be changeless, like my smile, like the shape of my body and my nonexistent soul. As the embodiment of pleasure and beauty, everyone who looked at me would be pleased. There would be no hell, no guilt, no sin, just Ken. Ken and heaven. Lots and lots of heaven.

  5 | In a Cabin Down by the River

  “Come near so I can touch you…”

  —GENESIS 27:21

  The greatest part about summer Bible camp was that nobody there knew who I really was, or that I was ugly. And even if they did, that knowledge—along with our sin and our lustful thoughts—was supposed to be checked at the gate. It was the perfect place to start fresh and try again to make a new life. Which would last about a week.

  At camp we traded in the temptations of telephones and televisions for the old-fashioned pleasures of singing hymns and washing dishes. During arts and crafts, we painted rainbow stripes on plaster crucifixes, and at late-night devotionals, popular kids from other towns stood up to give testimony about how camp had really helped them not hate weird people as much. As I scooted closer to them on the bench, knowing that they were required to act as if they liked me, I grew in the faith that life wasn’t about how much they liked me, it was about how much Jesus liked me. That was what mattered most. We were not to take any glory for ourselves, but instead deflect it like tinfoil back up to the Almighty, to amplify His holy tan.

  Our cabins were divided by gender—girls on one side of the basketball
court, boys on the other, so the Men of God could more easily monitor our PDA. The campground itself was in the woods, high up on the banks of the Connecticut River. There were a few breaks in the trees where you could catch a glimpse of the river down in the valley, sparkling in the sun. Far away, cars crossed a drawbridge that spanned in the distance, and flags whipped at the top of the opera house on the opposite shore. But that view was for paying vacationers only and off-limits to Christian campers. Our job was to focus on the view of heaven inside our Bibles, not worldly distractions like natural scenery, unless of course you wanted to get baptized in it.

  Our cabin did, however, have a good view of the boys’ cabin, and the little swimming pool next to it, where the SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK sign was hanging crooked on the chain-link fence. But Christians were not so much concerned about drowning as mixed bathing. One look at our soggy, flat, spandex-covered rib cages would propel our brothers in Christ into a lather of sin from which there might possibly be no return.

  So as we walked across the basketball court for Girls’ Swim Hour, we were careful to wrap our bodies in towels from head to foot. I knew the boys would peek out from their tiny top-bunk windows anyway, straining with sinful anticipation, and it was one of the greatest treats of the day, second only to canteen.

  At camp, when we weren’t busy denying our flesh, we were praising God in song. Which meant we spent a lot of time singing about sheep. Sheep were God’s favorite metaphors, and metaphors were par for the course in one’s walk with Jesus, aka Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counselor, and, of course, Lamb of God. Songs about Jesus always alluded to baby sheep: the blood of the lamb, lambs going to slaughter, lost sheep, found sheep, dead but miraculously revived sheep—God loved Him some sheep. It was not unusual at all to sop up some lumpy oatmeal after singing in harmony about bathing in the sweet blood of the lamb.