Fleeing Fundamentalism Page 16

  The crowd sat in family groups squeezed neatly together, wide-eyed kids sandwiched between smiling parents. Even the children loved Pastor Dave’s colorful, animated sermons, many of them choosing to stay in the adult service rather than file downstairs to children’s church. It was like having a front row seat at the Barnum and Bailey circus. I knew that, as always, this morning’s Scripture interpretation would be engaging. Several hours from now the elders would sit around their Sunday dinner tables and marvel at Pastor Dave’s astounding insight and biblical exegesis. “For a man of thirty-five, David certainly has more than his share of godly wisdom,” the board chairman would say.

  David began the Scripture reading, and a sea of voices followed: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you remember the Lord’s death till he returns.” A ray of color spilled through the stained-glass window, as if Jesus might descend at any moment and preside over His own memorial. Instead the rainbow vein of light bathed David’s brow, anointing him with divine radiance, signaling to many in the congregation that in Christ’s absence, their faithful minister could easily serve as God’s devoted understudy. As I watched the congregation that morning, I supposed that few would have been shocked to see their pastor’s hands suddenly brandish the stigmata.

  And David also had Jesus’ gift of storytelling. Each Sunday, before he unveiled a new set of rules for right living, he’d warm the crowd with a lively tale: “Several months ago, I was called to serve on jury duty. After I arrived at the courthouse, the clerk informed me of a procedure called voir dire—a French phrase meaning ‘to speak truly.’ It’s a process in which attorneys determine who will reside on the jury, by questioning those summoned.” David’s expression turned pensive. “A similar method of investigation occurs when we prepare to take the Lord’s Supper. Instead of an outside entity conducting the inquiry, however, the apostle Paul tells us we are to conduct our own voir dire. In verse 32, he instructs us to examine ourselves and confess our sins before we partake of communion.” His voice slowed, and he leaned forward against the pulpit, placing his hand flat on its surface as he had years ago in college. “By such confession, we remain separate from the world and avoid sharing in its sure condemnation.”

  This image of heathen judgment brought a hearty “Amen” from Robert, who liked it most when David preached condemnation down on errant lifestyles, especially the homosexuals, feminists, and liberals who, in his opinion, were responsible for the breakdown of America’s moral fiber. Robert was a great fan of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio talk show, and I had often heard him saying, “Praise God for Dobson’s stand against gay marriage and homos in the military. These are the atrocities that have eroded the Christian foundation of this nation.” Robert said that if we allowed such transgressions to continue, God was going to judge America—that it was simply despicable how far this country had fallen from the path of righteousness. I glanced at Robert, with Susan tucked in beside him, and marveled at his know-it-all face, hard set and jutting forward.

  But even though I felt disgust with Robert as he shouted another “Amen,” I had to admit that not all Christians were like him. Many lived by the Golden Rule and were generous, gracious, and humane. Take Herm Jorgensen, sitting at the end of the row, a massive Norwegian fisherman with huge hands and an even bigger heart. He was strong across the chest, with a full beard and black-rimmed half glasses that he wore on the end of his nose, like now, until he’d take them off to look you in the eye and say, “And how are ye today, fine lady?” When he spoke up in Bible study, he always interpreted Christianity through the lenses of compassion, emphasizing the passages that taught generosity and shunned judgment. Herm was a church elder and always voiced common sense in the board meetings. But unfortunately he didn’t hold the same status as the old guard, not having been part of the original core of the church. He was also a bit of a renegade—a divorced man, a freethinker with his own theories about God and little allegiance to doctrine. (It was rumored that the original members let him on the board because he had lots of money and gave plenty to the church.) David told me that Herm often said at board meetings, “I think we need to get our pastor and his wife out of that fishbowl parsonage. Let’s put a down payment on a house for them.” No one listened to him much, though. Most of the time he sat stoically in board meetings and in church; he wasn’t the kind of elder who was ever going to stand up and pray or testify in a loud voice.

  I thought about such things that morning in October of 1988: the sanctimonious and the kind, the sincere and the not so sincere—evaluations and musings alongside the plans I plotted for my own escape. Several weeks earlier I had experienced an epiphany of sorts, one of those life-changing moments when you suddenly see yourself clear to make a decision that you know will forever change the course of your life. It happened on my birthday. That morning David announced that he had arranged a surprise excursion to celebrate my big day and that we would be leaving for Vancouver that afternoon. Dread shot up my body as Pam, his secretary, burst into the house, ready to begin the prearrangement to babysitting. “This is kind of short notice,” I said, grasping at any excuse, logical or not, to release me from the pleasure trip.

  “How can you be so apathetic? I’d be ecstatic if I had such a romantic husband,” said Pam, ever loyal, ever trusting.

  I wanted to say back, “I’d be happy to let you take my place.” But of course I didn’t. Instead I listened to David describing to Pam and me how he had planned the trip down to the smallest detail.

  “I borrowed Don’s new Cadillac so we can drive in style,” he said, “and I got us a great-view room at the Four Seasons—it’s the nicest hotel in Vancouver.”

  David and I got into the car, and Pam waved to us from the front door, looking starry-eyed and envious. David flashed his killer grin at her and shouted from the window, “Don’t hesitate to call us if you need anything!” However, less than fifteen minutes up the freeway, David’s mood began to change. Pulling a fifth of Jim Beam out from under the seat, he announced, “I’ve heard there are some great gay bars in Vancouver, with terrific amateur strip contests. You know I’ve always wanted to enter one of those—I think I’ll do just that.” Then, after a short pause, he added, “As a celebration for your birthday, of course.”

  I sat stunned for a moment and then said, “You know, David, I don’t have any desire whatsoever to see you strip at a gay bar.”

  He ignored the comment and took another swig of Jim Beam, driving on in silence. We arrived in Vancouver and checked into the Four Seasons. As I unpacked my suitcase, David grabbed the phone book and scribbled addresses onto a yellow legal pad. “Twelfth and Howe,” he whispered, then almost shouted, “Let’s go!” We pulled up to the flashing marquee of the Odyssey, and David jumped out while I sat in the car. Some time later he yanked open the door and dropped heavily into the seat. “Shit, amateur night is Tuesday instead of Thursday,” he said, slamming his palm down on the steering wheel. “I knew I should have called ahead. The guy in there tells me that none of the gay bars in Vancouver have an amateur night tonight.”

  We drove back to the hotel, and David picked up the phone book again. “Since I missed my chance to dance,” he said in the tone of a petulant child who’d just been denied his daily chocolate, “I’m going to hire a stripper to come here.”

  “Listen, David, I’m not interested in strippers. Whose birthday is this anyway? If we’ve come to Canada to celebrate my birthday, I don’t want to watch naked dancers.”

  By this time David had been drinking for several hours, which meant I was on shaky ground. “You’re completely unable to have any fun,” he said. “Perpetually uptight about everything. Will you at least go out dancing with me, or is that too much excitement for your boring little self?”

  Around nine we arrived at Club 212, a wild place with pulsating strobe lights and ear-breaking music. Twenty-year-olds, and those making an unsuccessful attempt to look like twenty, crashed up against one anot
her, while the sober ones in the crowd surveyed one another like starving coyotes in search of warm flesh. David and I sat down at a table on the edge of the dance floor. Before long he disappeared. It took me some time to realize that he wasn’t just in the bathroom. Shit, I thought, and kept my head down, hoping I’d go unnoticed from the bar lined with men, hunched over the counter with their wolf’s hair slicked down, too anxious, too alert. Soon a young man who looked nothing like the prison-break group at the bar asked me to dance. After we danced, he introduced himself as Nathan and asked if he could sit with me. “Oh, my husband will be returning any minute,” I told him.

  “What kind of a guy would leave his wife alone in a place like this?”

  I smiled at Nathan and decided to ask him to join me. He was an economics graduate student at the University of British Columbia, and we talked about his classes and plans for the future. In a quiet Canadian accent, he told me he’d grown up in the interior on a dairy farm and had come to university on a scholarship. We chatted about graduate school and farm life, the difference between raising dairy and beef cattle, and how we both had run for our lives from the backcountry.

  After several hours, Nathan looked at me and said, “Let me take you home. I swear you can trust me.”

  “My husband is crazy, Nathan.”

  That was David’s cue to appear before us, recklessly drunk and furious. “So … I’ve been on the other side of the bar all night, watching that guy trying to pick you up!” he shouted.

  I suspected that instead of sitting across the darkened room watching me converse with a harmless graduate student, that David had actually spent the hours away from Club 212 exploring the seedier side of Vancouver.

  “You’re sick,” I said, jumping up and bolting out of the club before Nathan got smacked. David ran after me, charging out into the street, dodging traffic and shouting accusations as he went. “You couldn’t wait to get rid of me, could you? I can’t trust you for a minute. Give you a little free time, and you pick up some dweeb.”

  I crossed Government Street and switched back, heading by memory toward the Four Seasons. By the time I burst into our room, David was still at my heels, screaming accusations that by now had migrated onto a familiar topic. “You never show me any affection. You are simply not capable of love. You couldn’t love any man.”

  People who think death is the worst thing that can happen in this life don’t know a thing about brutality, I thought as I looked back into David’s red-veined, raging face. It was then that it happened. I decided I was finished with David, finished with religion, finished with my marriage. Some of the events of those years have gone from my memory; I have only a gauzy recall of a collection of people passing through—names, faces, fleeting conversations with church members—but the evening of my thirty-first birthday stands solid and clear in my mind. In that instant I realized I would rather be dead than live another minute with my husband. As David slammed around the room, I felt a deep calm come over me. I knew I would never retreat from my decision and that now, for the first time in ten years, David had no control over me. If he killed me while I was making my escape, I would go happily to the grave without God or the hope of any future existence. But now I must save my energy for one last lie, one final battle: to plan the getaway while still under the watchful eye of the minister and his congregation. I didn’t fight back that night but simply said, “You are right; I’m not affectionate enough, because I was raised in a very stoical home. I do need to learn to be more loving.”

  “Yes, very good … And do you promise to work on it more?” David’s voice was now calming, even gentle, as he smoothed the top of my hair with the flat of his hand as if he were stroking a cat.

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “Good, I know that you can’t be blamed for something you just don’t know how to do.” He whispered, “I’ll be patient, but you have to work on it every day,” pressing me against his chest and then unzipping the back of my dress, waves of alcohol fumes surging from his open mouth.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling my body go limp.

  Sex between us was like this now. Like the moment an antelope relinquishes her spirit to the lion’s jaws, knowing that any further struggle is futile. It is her last act of control, her only dignity, to choose the instant that she will liberate herself from life and deliver her body into the teeth that are cutting into her flesh. David, the lion, pulled me onto the bed, and when he had had his way, he rolled off, breathing hard, his limbs splayed out across the bed, sweat beading on his forehead, a tiny drop of it fixed like a jewel to the tip of his nose. The hair on his chest was glistening, his legs shaking from the conquest. A low growl rattled in his throat, contented and satisfied, as though he had just fed on a lump of bleeding flesh. “Wow, that was great,” he said, and immediately began to snore off his drunk.

  I lay awake, staring at the ceiling; while the room turned underneath me, not with drunken abandon but slowly, as if it really were moving through space and time. I knew I had crossed over an emotional divide that evening. I was going to leave David. I didn’t care about the reaction of my Christian family or friends. I was going to escape, with or without the biblical excuse of adultery to satisfy those around me.

  Suddenly I could see myself in the future, waiting tables, the perfect form of employment for a student—shorter hours, higher wages from tips—then, attending community college and on to the university; the kids getting older and more independent; and, once I earned my degree, my break for freedom. I would be patient; it would take some time, but I would stay the course. My eyelids grew heavy, and I let the sleep wash over me like a dark tide. Job, education, emancipation, I told myself—my new mantra. I was getting out.

  Nine

  Leaving the Faith

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I felt excited, almost giddy, but I knew that I couldn’t tell a soul about my plans for escape—not Susan, not anyone. No one was going to get a chance to talk me out of it. Even God, if He did happen to exist, wouldn’t be able to sway me. The day I walked out of the house and down the lane toward David’s study, to begin the first leg of my strategy, I said, “Sorry, God, my faith in life as a martyr has just ended.”

  David sat engrossed in his Greek lexicon when I walked in. “I’m going to stop homeschooling the girls,” I said. “It’s time they went to public school anyway, and I want to start working.” David peered up from his book, silent for a split second as he pulled the pen from behind his ear, like an archer nocking an arrow.

  “I always knew you didn’t want to be a mother,” he said. His voice was cold, but his eyes were filled with fury.

  “We both know that’s ridiculous,” I answered, turning and walking out of the room before he could send another arrow from his silver quiver of oratory.

  I rushed back to the house, picked up the phone, and called the Space Needle Restaurant. Even though I’d never eaten there before, it was the most expensive restaurant I could think of (higher prices, more tip potential). There was only one problem: I didn’t have enough experience to get the job. Although I’d waited tables in the 1970s at a truck stop in Montana, my steak and egg expertise hardly qualified me for fine dining. During summer breaks from college, I’d worked at the 4B’s in Missoula—a gigantic plaza open twenty-four hours a day, where brawny, tattooed truckers streamed in for a quick meal before climbing into their rigs and red-eyeing it for Minnesota. I knew plenty about slinging hash, nothing about lobster. I told myself just to keep repeating the positive-thinking phrase Susan had learned in her cookware sales seminars. “Fake it till you make it,” she’d always say. I intended to do just that. The only problem was that I needed a reference from a gourmet eating establishment. My mother was the only possible candidate.

  Mom once ran a small café in our hometown in Montana. It sat on the corner of Wall Street and Main and for thirty years had been owned and operated by a family named Cortner. When Mom reopened it, she kept its familiar name, Cortner’s Corner, and put ou
t the tiny parlor’s same homemade soups and ice creams. I worked for her one summer, scooping chocolate decadence and minestrone. I called Mom and told her my plan. “I’ll just rename it Cortner’s Fine Dining and list you as a reference. Don’t worry,” I said, “If they ask you anything you don’t want to lie about, just tell them the truth and I’ll try somewhere else. What can they do, arrest us?”

  There was a short silence, then Mom said, “All right, but I think you are courting disaster.”

  Miraculously, the interview went well. And no one had to lie—at least not technically. When Al, the Space Needle manager, called Mom, he simply asked her if she had employed me. “Yes,” she said, “and she’s a very hard worker,” not stretching the boundaries of her unshakable honesty one little bit.

  When Al interviewed me, he asked only one question about Cortner’s: “What were their specialties?”

  “Oh, wonderful seafood and meats.”

  He smiled, imagining coquilles St. Jacques and steak tartare, I’m sure. I grinned back, remembering clam chowder and beef barley soup.

  The Space Needle called that evening and asked me to show up in two days. Only then did I hesitate. Somehow in my determination to get the job, I’d forgotten about the numbing fear I had of heights; the ride to the top of the six-hundred-foot Needle each day, in a glass elevator, would be a real character builder. It also dawned on me that I didn’t know the difference between a cosmopolitan and a manhattan or how to open a wine bottle. Although David and I had been drinking for several years, we never brought liquor into the house. As much as I loved to order merlot during dinners out, or gin and tonics and tequila shooters while we were dancing, I knew nothing beyond that about mixed drinks.