“You’re sneaky, Grandma,” I said.
“You’re sneaky,” she said.
It was the Campfire Girls manual Margot had mentioned to me during that dinner, and also a nice letter about how sorry she was not to have been in touch more, and how she was wishing me well, and how she hoped to make it back to Montana again soon. There were also three hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, but they were pressed flat in the very center pages and I didn’t even find them until I was flipping through it during commercials, and by then Grandma had already pronounced the manual “Just fine for you to have, I don’t see why not,” so I didn’t say anything about them to her. The bills were stuck between a page that listed some of the requirements for becoming a Campfire Girls Torch Bearer Craftsman and a page with a poem, I guess it was a poem, or mantra, “The Torch Bearer’s Desire,” which just floated in a lake of white space given how short it was:
That Light
Which Has Been
Given To Me
I Desire
To Pass Undimmed
To Others
Margot had printed something, very small, beneath those words, tiny letters in pencil: Here’s hoping that cash is as good as light. Use it well. MMK.
Sometimes I thought about Margot, randomly, like maybe when I couldn’t sleep. I would wonder what she was doing, which exotic locale she might be in. And I would wonder what she’d think of my exile to Promise, always deciding, ultimately, that she wouldn’t think much of it at all.
“Why do you think she sent you that?” Grandma asked, nodding at the book and loading my plate with too many pieces of pizza.
“Because she and Mom were Campfire Girls together,” I said. “She said she thought I’d get a kick out of it.”
“It was a nice thought,” Grandma said. “You write her a nice thank-you and I’ll send it.” Then she added, “You don’t need to go on and on about your treatment in it.”
“I won’t, Grandma,” I said. It would be completely embarrassing, even though I knew she wouldn’t approve of such a place, to tell Margot Keenan all about Promise in a thank-you card. “That doesn’t even sound like me.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t. You not being around has me forgetting your ways.”
We watched the TV special pretty much in silence after that, except for one of us commenting on the size of the crowd a few times, how cold it looked. But then the host—this comedian, I guess, or actor, Jay Thomas—was doing some crappy shtick where he pretended to read from TV Guide the other options for television audiences should they want to change the channel, and none of his fake options were funny, something about Shannon Doherty and something about Suzanne Somers, but then he started talking about this “lost episode of The Andy Griffith Show,” one where Gomer tries on a bunch of women’s clothing and heads downtown to walk around until they “send him to the Marines to straighten him out.” And it was stupid, and nobody laughed, but Grandma, on the couch next to me, she tightened up a little at those words: straighten him out. I could feel her do it. And maybe that would have been that, but maybe ten minutes later, this Jay Thomas guy, he cuts to his cohost, Nia Peeples, who’s actually freezing it out down in Times Square in her leather coat and her hat and gloves while he stays warm in the Hard Rock Cafe with all the bands, and he tells her, “Remember, Nia, Times Square: Men are men. Some of the women are men. Some of the men are women, so be careful who you pet when you’re out there.”
And this Nia lady basically says that she can take care of herself, and the joke is over, or they move on, whatever, but right after that Grandma turned to me and said, “I don’t know why they think those queer jokes are so damned funny.”
“He sucks, that’s why,” I said.
Grandma waited a moment and then said, quietly, “It’s not so bad there, is it, Spunky?”
“In Times Square?” I asked. “How would I know?”
“At your school,” Grandma said, making sure not to look at me, but plucking stray kernels of popcorn from the coffee table, the couch, and putting them back into the bowl. “Is it very hard for you there?”
And I said, “It’s not so bad, Grandma. It’s pretty much fine, actually.”
Then she waited a few more moments, the band on the TV superloud, their electric guitar noise almost painful to hear because they were maybe drunk and also because she had the volume up so high. She said, “But are you feeling any different because of what they’ve got you doing out there?”
I knew what she meant by different, she meant better, fixed, straightened out; but I answered her based on the word she’d actually used and not her intended meaning, and I said, “I do feel different. I don’t really know how to explain it.”
She patted my hand, looked relieved. “Well, that’s good then, huh? That’s what matters most.”
We watched until the ball dropped, welcomed in 1993. It was the first year, after a ban that had been in effect for decades, that they reinstated confetti, all colors and sizes, the long curlicue pieces and the tiny metallic cutouts, all of it flung from the upper-level windows and rooftops of those buildings surrounding Times Square. On the screen it rained and rained confetti, for minutes, and that glitter-rain, plus the cameras flashing and the lights from the billboards and the awesome mass of the crowds in their shiny hats and toothy smiles, made that world pop and shine and blur in a way that makes you sad to be watching it all on your TV screen, in a way that makes you feel like, instead of bringing the action into your living room, the TV cameras are just reminding you of how much you’re missing, confronting you with it, you in your pajamas, on your couch, a couple of pizza crusts resting in some orange grease on a paper plate in front of you, your glass of soda mostly flat and watery, the ice all melted, and the good stuff happening miles and miles away from where you’re at. At least that’s how it made me feel that year.
Chapter Seventeen
Adam Red Eagle came back from Christmas break with his gorgeous hair all shorn off, to right up against his scalp, just stubble there really, though it started growing in fast. His father had insisted, and Adam said there was no way around his father’s insistence. He made his voice puffed up when he imitated him: We’re not savages anymore. And for Chriss sake we’re not women, either. The weird thing was that Adam’s now nearly bald head did nothing to make him any less womanly, or less feminine; in fact, it accentuated his high cheekbones and amazing skin, the Dietrich arch of his eyebrows, his full lips, all of his beauty somehow now spotlighted without that curtain of hair.
A few other things had changed since our return. I now had decoration privileges (though items had to first be approved by Lydia, and since there was nothing approved that I felt like Scotch-taping up there, I just left my lonely iceberg adrift on a sea of drywall). I was also now far enough along in the program to be a part of weekly group support sessions, which replaced my one-on-ones with Rick but not, unfortunately, with Lydia. While home in Idaho, Jane had purchased quite a lot of killer pot off of someone she mysteriously described as an old flame, a tragedy of a woman, and she used that to supplement our dwindling stock. And finally, the Viking Erin had begun a New Year’s regime of Christian aerobics, one that had already lasted past the first-week burnout of so many similar kinds of resolutions.
She’d brought back to Promise a couple of videotapes, three brand-new workout outfits, and a blue plastic aerobic step with black traction pads across its top. She was all business. The videos were from the Faithfully Fit line and both of them featured Tandy Campbell, a perky brunette “cheerleader for Christ” who was compact and trim and totally rocked her shiny spandex tank tops and black Lycra stretch pants.
Erin was so excited. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase before she was thrusting those tapes in my face, Tandy beaming at me above the title: Joyful Steps—Cardio for Christ.
“Will you do it with me?” she asked, performing a mock arm curl with the tape. “Lydia says we can use the rec room if we get up early.?
??
“I didn’t even know that Jesus was into aerobics,” I said. “I’ve always imagined him as a speed walker, maybe across water.”
“How can you not know Tandy Campbell?” she asked, now holding both tapes straight out in front of her, one in each hand, and doing a series of arm extensions and retractions that I guess were supposed to be somehow aerobic, though they looked kind of like the moves a traffic cop might use. “She’s a huge big deal. H-U-G-E—huge! My mom went to one of her power weekends in San Diego with two of my aunts. They got to meet her. They said she’s totally tiny in person, but still a presence, a real dynamic presence.”
“I bet my aunt Ruth knows about her,” I said. “I bet she’s a fan.”
“I’m sure,” Erin said, now doing some leg bends with the arm movements, which had grown noticeably less grand and precise, even in just the thirty seconds or so she’d been at it. “She’s totally amazing; everybody’s a fan. You have to do them with me—please? Please, please, please? I need a workout buddy and you can’t run right now anyway. You won’t be able to until April, probably.”
She was right about that. We’d had snow at Promise since mid-October, but there had been feet and feet added during our couple of weeks away, and now everything except for the main road, which one of the neighboring ranchers plowed for us, and the path to the barn, which we all took turns shoveling, was mounded in white drifts, some so high and strangely shaped from the wind that there was no way at all to tell what was under them, or where solid ground might begin.
I thought that I’d do the tapes with her a couple of times, see them enough to make fun of them effectively when I reported back to Jane and Adam. (Lydia had given Erin permission to invite all the female disciples to these morning workout sessions; however, Christian aerobics were not, apparently, an appropriately gendered activity for men.) I don’t know if it was maybe the lure of the almighty VHS tape reminding me of my days of freedom, but it didn’t take very many mornings before I was in the habit of waking up to Tandy and her shiny smile, her bouncy energy, her strangely endearing habit of renaming standard aerobics moves in Jesusy ways, even if her substitutions didn’t really make sense and she overused the word praise: Grapevine = Praise-Vine; March It Out = March Your Praise; all manner of kicks or punches = Joy Blasts.
Other than those substitutions, and the syncopated thump-thump-boom of remixed gospel songs, the only thing discernibly Christian about Tandy’s workouts were the warm-up and cool-down meditations, wherein she would use the Word to motivate us toward our fitness goals. Her favorite passage was Hebrews 12:11—No discipline is pleasant while it’s happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way. And at first, Tandy’s workouts were kind of painful and intense, Erin out of breath by six minutes in, and afterward both of us with bangs stuck to our sticky foreheads in the breakfast line, where Erin was also practicing discipline, even choosing cottage cheese and canned peaches on the days when Reverend Rick made his Rice Krispies–coated cinnamon French toast. Sometimes Helen Showalter would join us in the rec room, her movements clunky and her steps hard, shaking the leaves of the potted plants. Jane came once, to take Polaroids, mostly, and a few times Lydia came, to observe our behavior I guess. She sure didn’t launch into a step, joy-clap, squat, step. But it was usually just the two of us. Erin’s clothes were looser by a couple weeks in, and by Valentine’s Day they’d replaced parts of her Promise Uniform with a whole size smaller and she’d had her mom send us a care package via the mail service offered by Greyhound Bus Lines (which took twelve days to arrive in Bozeman but was cheap for sending heavy stuff). Her package contained two sets of eight-pound dumbbells coated in purple rubber and a new tape to keep us motivated: SPIRITUAL LIFT—Toning More Than Your Muscles.
When I was seven or eight, I was sort of obsessed with those sticky-hand things you could buy for twenty-five cents from the toy dispensers lined up just inside the automatic doors at grocery stores. The hands were usually some neon color, five fingered but puffy and cartoonish, and attached to a longish cord of the same material. I collected all the versions: the glitter sticky hand and the glow-in-the-dark sticky hand and the jumbo-size sticky hand. I used to drape them over my doorknob and choose just one or two for any given day, like some girls might have chosen their jewelry. There wasn’t much you could do with them, really, besides whip them at people and watch them cringe or squeal or laugh when the stickiness smacked their skin, though there was something satisfying in the way the weight of the hand would stretch thin the cord, so thin sometimes you were just sure it would snap, and then the whole thing would spring back to its original shape and size. The worst thing about the sticky hands was their propensity for collecting tiny fibers and hairs, dust, muck, and the difficulty of properly cleaning them after that happened. You couldn’t, really, ever quite get them clean again.
The longer I stayed at Promise, the more all the stuff they were throwing at me, at us, started to stick, just like to those sticky hands, in little bits, at first, random pieces, no big deal. For instance, maybe I’d be in bed during lights out and I’d start to think about Coley and kissing Coley, and doing more with Coley, or Lindsey, or whomever, Michelle Pfeiffer. But then I might hear Lydia’s voice saying, You have to fight these sinful impulses: fight, it’s not supposed to be easy to fight sin, and I might totally ignore it, or even laugh to myself about what an idiot she was, but there it would be, her voice, in my head, where it hadn’t been before. And it was other stuff too, these bits and pieces of doctrine, of scripture, of life lessons here and there, until more and more of them were coated on, along for the ride, and I didn’t consistently question where they had come from, or why they were there, but I did start to feel kind of weighed down by them.
Part of what contributed to this weighing down was undoubtedly my new group support sessions. Our group consisted of Steve Cromps, Helen Showalter, Mark Turner, and superskinny, Southern-drawled Dane Bunsky, a disciple I got to know better very quickly (support group had a way of making that happen). Dane was a recovering meth addict who was at Promise as the scholarship child of some megachurch in Louisiana.
We met in the classroom on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at three p.m., pushing the chairs into a circle, a chorus of metal scraping linoleum that was nails on chalkboard to me. Lydia would bring a box of tissues to each session, and she’d also wheel in a cart with a big urn of hot water on it and mugs, a container of instant hot chocolate mix, and also this completely addictive mixture of Tang and loose tea and instant lemonade powder that Reverend Rick made in big batches and called Russian tea, apparently as some sort of dated cosmonaut joke. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the drink cart, though, until the fifteen-minute midsession break.
We started each session with a prayer chain. All of us, Lydia included, would join hands, and whoever’s turn it was that day would start by saying: I will not pray for God to change me because God does not make mistakes and I am the one who is tempted by sin: Change will come through God, but within me. I must be the change. You had to say this exactly, word for word, and if you didn’t, Lydia would interrupt the prayer chain and make the starter repeat it until it was perfect. My first go-round I kept forgetting the word because and I had to say the whole thing like four times.
After the starting prayer was said correctly, the starter would squeeze either of their hands, and the recipient of the squeeze would add something of their own, usually something about asking God for strength, or thanking Jesus for this time together, something, and then we’d continue around the circle. Sometimes the prayers were more personal or pointed, but since this chain was just the opening proceeding to an extended share session, usually not. We were supposed to keep our eyes closed during this time, to focus on Christ alone, but I got to know my brethren by the feel of their hands: Helen’s thick grip and fast-pitch softball calluses, still not completely healed despite months of not playing; Dane’s skin, crac
ked and rough; Lydia’s thin fingers as icy as you’d imagine them, exactly so. When the prayers again reached the starting person, their job was then to say: The opposite of the sin of homosexuality is not heterosexuality: It is Holiness. It is Holiness. It is Holiness. I loved it when it was Dane’s turn, because his accent and the lazy slow-speak way that he said absolutely everything, no matter what, made that mantra sound strangely seductive.
We were allowed to move beyond our childhoods in these sessions and to actually talk about more recent experiences we’d had concerning the sin of homosexual behavior and temptation, though Lydia would frequently cut short particular monologues with “That’s enough of that—we’re not here to glorify our past sins; we’re here to acknowledge and repent for them.” Or, once, “Too much detail, Steve! Too much! Let’s remember who’s in the details, shall we?” I think that was the only time I ever heard her even attempt something like a joke, which maybe isn’t so much a criticism, because there was usually very little about support group that was funny.
Dane and Helen had both been molested, which Lydia said was a common reason that people found themselves unnaturally attracted to members of the same sex: in Helen’s case because abuse from her uncle Tommy had convinced her that being feminine meant being weak and vulnerable to such abuse, and because it made her fear any sexual intimacy with men; and in Dane’s case because he had been abandoned by his father at an early age and therefore had an unhealthy curiosity about men, one that manifested into an obsession when a much older boy placed in the same foster home forcefully suggested the two of them fool around. Dane had also spent time as a runaway hustling for meth, and those stories, full of older men and their dingy apartments and trailers, Dane’s all-consuming addiction, were completely gruesome, even without the specific sexual details.