Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Once I stopped to consider what I’d done, I could feel my heart thumping like a kettledrum. David reacted by stomping his foot on the floor like Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale, pounding his way into the center of the earth. “This is total lunacy. How can you work and maintain your responsibilities here? I forbid you.”

  “I’m doing it anyway,” I said.

  Later I realized that David’s anger actually helped me overcome my terror by reminding me why I was waiting tables in the first place. I purchased a corkscrew and started practicing, busting cork after cork but taking comfort in the fact that I’d also have three days of on-the-job training.

  I stepped into the glass elevator at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, chanting to myself, “This elevator has never malfunctioned. In twenty-five years of existence, it has never ever malfunctioned … twenty-five years—my God, this thing is a death trap!” My eyes closed, squishing back the tears of terror and loss at the idea of never holding my grandchildren. I didn’t see the beautiful orange sun rising up between the downtown skyscrapers, but kept my eyelids tightly together until the elevator doors opened. I slipped out quickly. Al was standing there, ready to introduce me to Cindy, a kind, wide-eyed brunette whose job it was to tutor me in survival.

  “My job is to show you the ropes, and your job is to pick up all the weird nuances of waiting tables at the Space Needle.” She smiled.

  Being the tourist magnet that it was, working at the Needle meant ten hours running with almost no time even for a bathroom break. I watched openmouthed as lithe servers shouldering huge trays filled with lobster and lamb dodged one another like country-and-western line dancers. To add to the chaos, the tiny central kitchen remained stationary while the dining room revolved, so that visitors could get a panoramic view of the Seattle skyline in one hour. You’d step from section A onto a fixed kitchen floor and, ten minutes later, rush back out onto a moving dining area that had changed to section D. And just to keep things interesting, in a strong wind the top-heavy Space Needle swayed slightly—the architects had designed it to withstand two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and to swing rather than snap off in the event of an earthquake. Keeping your balance was like tap-dancing on the bow of the Stars & Stripes during the America’s Cup race.

  That first day Cindy said, “I’m going to have you deliver all the drinks for my tables,” which should have been an easy task. But when I stepped up to the bar, I didn’t recognize a single beverage on the tray, which was forested with fruit-speared glassware. I had a gut-wrenching feeling that my mother had been right. I shot a quick look at Dennis, the lanky bartender with a sandpaper voice, who was finishing an animated joke to one of the waiters. I made a snap judgment that I could trust him—I would have to. I introduced myself, then leaned toward the bar and made my confession quick: “I’m here to pick up drinks that I can’t identify. I haven’t actually served mixed drinks before—the only place I’ve worked is a truck stop in Montana.”

  Shock darted across his face, followed by a generous grin. He leaned down with his gangling frame and whispered, “I’d be happy to tell you their names.”

  Thank God Dennis didn’t burst out laughing (though months later, after I knew every drink from the rusty nail to the screaming orgasm, he did every time he retold the story). That first day he simply said, “Hey, when things slow down, I’ll tell you about the little old ladies from Montana I waited on once.” Throughout the day Dennis patiently whispered the names of every drink I came to collect. When our shift was over, he told me his tale: “One day two quaint little characters sat up at the bar and ordered bourbon shooters. When I asked them where they’d come from, one of them said, ‘We’re from [baaing like a sheep] Mo-o-onta-a-a-a-ana-a-a, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.’”

  Dennis threw his head back and laughed with abandon. It was then that I knew I’d made the right decision in getting a job at the Space Needle. Even driving home that night, when my shoulders ached and my calves began to cramp from the grueling physical labor of waiting tables, I was happy. Even when I got close to the house and my stomach started to knot with anxiety, knowing that David would be in a foul humor, I was content. As I entered the house, David was lying on the sofa, relaxing after a quiet day of Bible study. “We’re starving—when will dinner be ready? If you’re going to work, you can’t just forget about your other responsibilities!” he yelled.

  Whispering my mantra, “Job, education, emancipation,” I threw a Mrs. Smith’s lasagna in the oven.

  It was immediately evident that my fellow servers at the Space Needle were a wild crowd—a group that used the word fuck as if it were an article of speech. But I also watched them show each other great courtesy and respect. They seemed to embrace life without guilt and other human beings without judgment, reveling in their own individuality and appreciating the trait in others; what people believed in or whom they slept with was their own business. It wasn’t as though they were perfect—there were still internal battles at work, and some held on to six-month-old vendettas—but by and large my rowdy, irreligious coworkers were honest and unwaveringly fair; beneath their rough exteriors dwelt sincere, compassionate human beings.

  They also had a great talent for having a good time. At the end of a grueling breakfast-lunch shift they’d congregate at Yukon Jack’s, a saloon that sat at the base of the Space Needle, to drink and tip away a sizable chunk of their own hard earned cash, arriving at the bar to a rowdy welcome from the Yukon staff. In this solid fraternity, the lucky servers who got our group knew they’d earn more tips from us than they’d made all day. The Space Needle crew filled up a huge rectangular table and boisterously compared experiences: hollered, swore, and sang, then told stories about the great people, best tips, and worst customers they’d waited on that day. I loved sneaking away and joining them after work; it was like an upended church service, but this one felt good for the soul.

  As I made friends with my gay coworkers, I shamefully remembered my ignorance and prejudice against Diane and Evie at Bible college, using Scripture to condemn people of whom I had no understanding. This was going to be a different world without a “God-breathed” holy book to do my thinking for me. I knew how much my worldview had changed when one morning my new friend Thomas came in, his voice shaking with emotion. “Last night I found out that my partner, Boyd, is having an affair.”

  “God, that’s terrible!” I said without any hesitation, genuine sadness welling up in my throat. In years past I would have disapproved of Thomas without even taking time to know the compassionate and tenderhearted soul that he was. That was when I was sure how the world worked, sure of my own judgments, sure of the judgments of a God who would show little compassion for Thomas. Now I wondered if God felt as disgusted with the condemnations that religious people attributed to Him as the people being condemned felt.

  I didn’t attend church on Sundays anymore, starting work on the weekends at 6:00 a.m. and not getting home until after 5:00. I knew that the congregation was beginning to whisper behind their hands about my working on what they thought of as the Sabbath and no longer singing in the choir, no longer teaching women’s Bible study, or throwing church dinner parties. My performance as a minister’s wife was being scored like an Olympic ice-skating competition, and I knew I was coming up with scandalously low points. I did go to Wednesday night Bible study, however, but eventually, in a fit of recklessness, ended up sullying my image even further.

  One evening during a packed study, I squeezed into the back pew. David had already begun his lesson on Luke 16 and was reading verse 22: “the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom,” when someone raised his hand and said, “What do we say to people who claim that hell isn’t a literal place?”

  “We say that Jesus mentions hell over ten times in the New Testament. Are we going to take Christ at his word, or not?”

  I sat in the pew and thought,
even if the man named Jesus was talking about a literal hell, how would we know? This was a parable Christ was telling. And even though the idea of everlasting damnation never found its way into Jewish theology, Fundamentalists clung tenaciously to the ghoulish notion. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for hell represents a burning trash heap outside an ancient city, where the fire is eventually extinguished. In fact, I had learned from my clandestine history readings, the concept of eternal hellfire wasn’t even embraced by the Christian church until the fourth century, when Saint Augustine began to teach that those who did not receive Jesus as their Savior were headed for the bottomless pit. So I sat in the crowded pew and thought, How curious that a loving deity would consign 95 percent of the world’s population to everlasting torment for not knowing the proper password—especially when those who chanted the right incantation seemed so profoundly confused.

  Then, like someone blithely boarding a bus without brakes, I raised my hand and said, “It’s beginning to strike me as strange that God would cast most of his children into eternal hellfire when, even as mere mortals, we would never throw our own kids into a burning pit for disobedience.”

  David looked at me in disbelief. He didn’t respond, and after a few seconds of stunned silence from the congregation, he moved on to the next question. When the service ended, Phoebe, my old carpet runner nemesis, marched up to me and said, “Your role is not to question the sacred doctrines of the church, but to be a testimony to its teachings!” Apparently an overcrowded heaven was something that Phoebe just couldn’t abide.

  Once we got home David had a word with me as well. “It’s suicide to let the congregation in on your disbelief. You need to remember, you are the minister’s wife,” he said, bowing down from the heavens of his fullness, readjusting my position on the earthly mission that he and God had appointed as mine.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll be more careful.”

  “I don’t believe in hell either,” he went on, walking into the kitchen, opening the cabinet above the refrigerator, and pulling out a bottle of tequila that I had no idea was there, “but we just can’t expose our doubts to the congregation.” As he made his way back into the living room, he poured himself a shot and slugged it, then poured another. Downing it, he sank into the overstuffed chair, tequila bottle in one hand, shot glass in the other. “The fact is, I don’t believe in any of this anymore. You know, I came across a cassette tape of a sermon I did in 1983, hollering hellfire and brimstone. Back then I thought I sounded so melodious and eloquent, but five years later it sounded just like it was: high-pitched and silly,” he said, throwing back another gulp. “Isn’t it ironic, a guy condemning sinful society and completely without a conscience himself? I swear, it’s like losing a limb; I just don’t have one anymore.”

  Over the next few months, David’s agitation with religion continued. He began to complain more each day about the stress of the ministry and the idiocy of Fundamentalism. Then one evening he suddenly announced, “I’m resigning from Calvary Baptist. This whole religion business is like adding two and two together and coming up with five.”

  David had dropped hints before that he was frustrated with his job: the elder’s censuring of his sermons, the old guard’s fear of church growth and loss of control. But his sudden announcement made me also wonder if he wasn’t beginning to worry that our secret drinking parties with other couples in the congregation might eventually be revealed. Although, since the night I feigned having my period, David had not suggested we nude hot-tub together again, our drinking escapades were escalating. If we separated from the watchful eye of the church we could party without concern.

  That Saturday David invited our drinking buddies over to tell them about his plans to leave the ministry. They drifted into our backyard, chatting and grabbing a Pepsi out of the cooler while David lit the grill. Summer was ripening. The ash tree was making its little green berries, and the goldfinches had returned to take up residence in its branches as they did each year. I put on some Kenny G, an airy CD with notes that floated like fireflies over a summer lawn, a thousand of them, winking here and there. Robert took shelter in a chair under the umbrella and said to David, “Can you believe that liberal Supreme Court, voting to protect a traitor’s right to burn the American flag? What in God’s name is this country coming to? I think you should preach a sermon on the subject, David.”

  “My sermon days are just about over, old buddy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m going to resign from Calvary Baptist.”

  Everyone froze. You could hear seagulls from the Pacific crying overhead.

  “No way,” Tina finally said, her lip already quivering. “You are kidding us, right?”

  “No, I’m not kidding,” David said. “I need some time away from the ministry, to think. I’m completely exhausted. Everything seems so crazy right now.”

  “What are you going to do?” Robert almost whispered.

  “I’m going to do some carpentry work for John Slate for a while. I’m looking forward to a little hard physical labor.”

  “But the church is growing so fast, and everyone is delighted with your ministry,” Susan said.

  “I’m burned out, guys. But Carlene and I aren’t going far. We can still have great times together.”

  “At least you’re not going to leave the state—then we’d just have to follow you,” Hal said, laughing. Everyone fell back into silence, and the backyard looked like that Twilight Zone scene where the whole town is frozen, immovable, unable to speak.

  The members of Calvary Baptist were just as shocked, and they grieved David’s resignation like the death of a saint. We left the church and moved to a nearby town, where he started working as a carpenter. At first David was glad to be free from his ministerial responsibilities, but before long he realized how much gratification he received from preaching, and he began to sink deeper into despair.

  I tried to mask my own happiness at the freedom that I felt, sensing the bonds of iron I’d known for so many years turning into spiderwebs. I enjoyed my job and colorful coworkers at the Space Needle, and since Jason was starting school that September, I decided to implement the second leg of my strategy. One evening I told David I was going to start classes that fall at the nearby community college.

  “There is no way you can start school,” he said. “I let you take that job at the Space Needle, and that’s it. Besides, you can’t possibly do both; you’ll never be able to keep up with the schedule.”

  “I’m going to try,” I said, knowing that David was without the patriarchal structure of religion to defend his dominance, and so he had no justification to stop me. “You spent five years of our marriage in seminary. Now that the kids are all in school, it’s my turn.”

  I registered for classes at Shoreline Community College and, hoping that some of the credits from Bible college would transfer, made an appointment to see an academic counselor. After reviewing my transcript, she told me that since my religious degree was unaccredited, I’d have to start from scratch. At first I felt upset and cheated, but I then realized that every moment I spent angry was just wasted time: job, education, emancipation, I repeated.

  I rushed onto the campus that September morning in 1989, the air crisp and smelling of fall and promise. I was ready, with blank notebooks and great intentions, looking forward to new teachers and interesting classmates—a feeling of anticipation that I hadn’t experienced in years. As I ran past a sea of teenagers in a group, I realized just how long I’d been away from school, that I was a thirty-two-year-old mother of three, not entirely sure I could pass a science course, and on top of that, late for class. I stepped into Mr. Peterson’s world history and wobbled down the aisle, my legs rubbery with fear, glad to go unnoticed among the swarm of young faces buzzing with excitement. “Two thousand years before Christ,” Mr. Peterson called out in a deep baritone voice, “a brilliant culture, located on the island of Crete, possessed vast cen
ters of wealth and power, a written language, a powerful fleet that ruled over the Aegean, and one of the most artistic civilizations in history. Nine hundred years later, this ancient kingdom inspired Homer’s mythic vision.”

  A hand flew up in the front row, and a fresh-scrubbed student said, “I thought everyone in two thousand BC was barbaric.”

  “Au contraire,” Mr. Peterson said with a laugh, “these civilizations were just the opposite.”

  “What were they like?” another voice inquired.

  “The five storied palaces of Minoa, Knossos, and Gournia possessed countless rooms, statues, and courtyard theaters. Luxurious dwellings surrounded the palace, filled with specialized workshops, altars, and temples. Even simple homes had elaborate frescoes and paintings.”

  “When did we discover these lost cities?”

  “The palace of Minos was unearthed in the spring of 1900. Almost immediately researchers realized they had stumbled upon a structure unequaled by anything previously known in ancient history. Excavation of the other civilizations followed. Homer’s epic cities, once considered legend, were now real.”

  As I listened to the spirited interaction in the class—information about recent finds in archeology that were reinterpreting ancient history, students asking questions and challenging the professor, a professor who was not afraid to be challenged—I realized how different this experience was going to be from Bible college. This would not be the herd life of religion, debarring any real inquiry, but a place to think, discover, and explore. I’m going to like college, I thought—a new set of rules and a new language, a new life. I felt as though a secret door had opened, a hidden bookshelf panel had turned, and I was walking through a new passageway, leaving everything behind.

  In the next few months, I threw myself into a demanding schedule, attending class in the morning, rushing from campus to work the lunch shift at the Space Needle, then dashing home to make dinner and spend time with the kids, and studying until late into the night. When the first term ended and I practically ran to the mailbox to find the letter from Shoreline Community College with my grades inside, I felt a sense of doom gripping my throat, just as it had in grade school when the teacher handed out our report cards. I hesitated and then ripped open the envelope: one B and four As. I screamed, feeling an enormous upwelling of relief inside my chest. I can do this, I thought. I ran across the street and burst into the house.