Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  “God, it was like the Inquisition. Is it always this harrowing?’’

  “Oh yes, completely degrading. And let me give you some advice. During your reviews don’t tell your caseworker anything you don’t have to. One day I wanted to get personal”—the young mother rolled her eyes—“so I slipped and told her about my son’s birthday party. She made me go back and fill in all the gifts as income. I had to write down everything and what it cost—all the socks, underwear, even the Lego set. It was totally humiliating.”

  From what I already knew about welfare, this small addition could easily have disqualified her and her son from receiving benefits. There isn’t much leeway for extra revenue while on assistance, considering that if a family of two has a total income of over $350 in any particular month, they became ineligible.

  I left the office as darkness was beginning to descend, washed by rain that had been falling gently but relentlessly for days. I drove through the hesitant light, the headlights of oncoming cars glaring into my eyes. I felt sad and thought about calling Susan to ask her if she would meet me for a drink, but decided that I didn’t want to hear one more story about Robert’s abuse or turn down another invitation to the new church they were now attending. As my car rattled down the freeway, suddenly an eighteen-wheeler shot past me and around the curve, its trailer shimmying wildly and sending a splash of water onto the windshield. My hands tightened around the wheel and the fear inside me felt like pond water hardening into ice. I would have to face alone whatever battles lay ahead.

  And the clashes did continue. Even though I technically qualified for welfare, Doris’s attitude remained hostile during each of our semiannual reviews. She would be standing at the door of her office when I arrived, the strain of disapproval puckering up around her lips, digging trenches alongside her nose and the corners of her deep set eyes, making her look like one of those frozen mummies they pulled out of the ice in the Andes. As soon as I sat down in the cold plastic chair of her office, she would say, “The laws should be changing soon—get ready to lose your benefits.” Then she’d request a mass of information about my financial aid package at the University of Washington, sending me scrambling back and forth between the welfare office and the university administration center, laden with documents, fear crystallizing in my chest that she would find the elusive loophole she looked for.

  But I found that the humiliation of welfare wasn’t confined to Doris’s reviews alone. Although we anticipated and appreciated the $240 in monthly food stamps, the kids often worried that their friends would see us using them. More than once I relinquished my place at the grocery checkout stand when a neighbor pulled in behind us. When I saw the terrified look flash across the children’s faces, I would spin the cart around and say, “Oh, hi, Gretchen, you take my place in line. Funny thing, I forgot the one thing I came for—sugar.”

  It was an uneasy time to be on public assistance—1993, the era of welfare reform. President Clinton had just announced his mission to “end welfare as we presently know it.” The Republicans answered back in their “Contract with America” with even more radical cuts. Although the proposed legislation did target welfare abuse, it also eventually eliminated the single mother trying to get an education. In the political fury to transform public assistance, the nation was obsessed with ferreting out those responsible for its inefficiency. One day while I was listening to a National Public Radio program, I caught the end of Bob Dole’s tirade about a divorced mother he’d heard about who was receiving benefits while attending college and not working. He promised America that he would work tirelessly to put an end to such abuse. But without an education, how was I going to make a better life for myself and the kids? I thought.

  The government didn’t see it that way. The issue had become a political wrestling match, with even the socially minded Bill Clinton anxious to score a point. Yet it seemed to me that this budget trimming frenzy was obscuring the country’s ability to visualize the long-term benefits of helping single mothers earn a college degree. With it I could double the money I made as a waitress. Over a lifetime, my salary increase would create twice as much in tax revenue and certainly reimburse the system for the $624 monthly supplement I’d received for a few years.

  Eventually Doris’s desire came true. In 1997, Washington passed the WorkFirst and Personal Responsibility Act, forcing single parents to juggle the rigors of work, school, and child rearing, all but destroying their hope of receiving a college degree. In the early 1990s, Clover Park Technical College near Tacoma, Washington, graduated five hundred nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses, and registered nurses each year under the old welfare program. Today it isn’t graduating any. The trend is also evident in Washington’s state colleges. Since reform, welfare recipients attending college have dropped by 35 percent. Recent studies reveal that the effect on single mothers has indeed been catastrophic, forcing them into low-paying jobs rather than helping them increase their income level through education—consigning them to poverty. Single mothers who took minimum wage jobs a decade ago are today making only sixty-five cents more an hour. The result of cutting this avenue of help has been so disastrous that eight states have changed their welfare laws, freeing students from the twenty-hour-workweek requirement. Washington State, however, has yet to review its welfare reform.

  Back in 1993, political rhetoric also implied that most “welfare moms” were delighted with—even aspired to—their fate. I found this claim ridiculous. Every woman on assistance I knew was there because she was not receiving child support and needed help in raising her children or in going back to school so she could get a better job. It seemed amazing to me that politicians protested so loudly about welfare mothers yet refused to direct their energy toward a real solution: child support laws with clout. I knew from Doris’s warnings and the news I read in the papers each day that the clock was ticking on my benefits. I took as many course credits at school as I could and went full-time during the summers.

  I started classes at the University of Washington knowing I was in a contest against time. Still, it was a lovely place to run the race, to watch twenty-year-olds bustle through Red Square with brilliant autumn leaves scattering across the plaza, to see the Hacky Sack players, skateboarders, and Frisbee aficionados: an eight-ring circus below the towering fourteen-thousand-foot volcano Mount Rainier.

  The student culture was as diverse as its attire: scrubbed young faces hurrying past, looking as if they’d just stepped out of an ad for Banana Republic or the Gap, boys from Seattle Prep in oxfords and carefully messy curls, girls wearing Abercrombie sweaters over crisp white cotton blouses. And another crowd who bought their clothes at secondhand stores like Buffalo Exchange or for twice the price at Encore Boutique. They all looked past me as they would have looked past their own mothers, even though I was technically the age of a big sister—well, okay, a youngish aunt. Either way, I was invisible.

  Even as I watched the twenty-year-olds, it was hard for me to imagine what their lives must be like. At twenty-one I had been married and already pregnant. Now, at thirty-four, I was worried whether I could squeeze Micael’s birthday cake out of the $240 monthly food stamp allotment, justify sneaking Doc Martens boots onto the overused Nordstrom credit card for Carise, or siphon off enough of the monthly welfare check to buy Jason’s Little League uniform. Although I loved my classes that first fall at the university, I kept silent and hung around like a suit in a closet. With all the studying I had to do, I no longer kept in touch with my friends at the Space Needle or returned calls from Susan. I told myself there was no time for socializing.

  I began to have a recurring dream: I am standing at a train station wearing a silky blue dress that feels soft and lovely against my legs. I walk to the magazine rack and pick out a glossy Cosmopolitan magazine, stepping onto the sheltered platform, perfectly calm and self-assured. The train is waiting, steam chugging out from under it like in the old movies—an elegant train, red and gray and gleaming. But just
as I am about to board it, I realize I don’t have my ticket, so I start digging through my purse, looking for it. I finally find it, only to drop it, losing more valuable time as the engine of the train quickens. Suddenly the train starts to pull away from the station, and I can’t move. It leaves the platform and I’m still there, but now my purse is gone and I’m barefoot. I look inside the station—it’s empty, deserted—and I look back down at myself. I’m naked and alone.

  David’s lifestyle reinforced my sense of isolation and fear as he sank deeper into alcoholism, going for weeks without making contact with the kids, telling them that he had become one of Seattle’s “night people,” who slept all day and then congregated to roam the city all night. One night at about two, I answered the phone, and he said, “There’s no reason to live. I’m going to kill myself, and I’m coming over to your house to do it.”

  “Listen, stay away from us, David,” I said. “I have a gun.”

  “That will be appropriate,” he said with a harsh laugh. “You can kill me instead.”

  Oh, my God, I thought, David had finally slipped over the precipice, had gone from being an egocentric narcissist to a madman. Forget the days when he would drink twenty shots of Cuervo at the Space Needle bar—now he was ready to jump over the side. I slammed down the receiver and called David’s parents, who sped over to his house and found him stumbling drunk and wheezing with pneumonia. He had stopped eating and had been drinking for days. Later that month he was admitted to a Seattle detox center. I hoped for his recovery, but still I felt as though David was like a hyena, circling around our lives, persistent and unpredictable, always ready for the kill.

  My recurring dream turned into a nightmare in which I would see David, in a blur at the top of the stairs to my bedroom, staring down at me in cold rage, his face distorted with drunkenness. Then he would slowly descend the steps toward me. I would fight to lift my legs, trying to get out of bed, get the clip to the gun, and save myself and the kids, but my limbs were frozen stiff and inflexible as a block of ice. One night I awoke in a cold sweat and grabbed the pistol from under my pillow, rushed to the closet and found the clip, shoved it in, cocked the trigger, and released the safety: twenty seconds. Maybe I should move the clip closer to the gun, I thought. David was strong and fast, and I wouldn’t have much time. Being able to pull the trigger didn’t worry me, but I feared that in my panic I wouldn’t have time to load the gun, or I might forget to release the safety. I rammed the clip into the gun and put it back under my pillow.

  By the second quarter at UW, when I stepped into an intellectual history class on Friedrich Nietzsche, my sense of aloneness was growing. During the first week’s reading, though, I found a compatriot to my cynicism and isolation. Nietzsche, the tormented fellow, despised organized religion with the same passion that I now felt. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he declares that the church is “the most malignant counterfeit that exists … sickness is the essence of Christianity.” The philosopher had no beef with Jesus, but he disdained the apostle Paul who, he said, misrepresented Christ’s teachings and created a storehouse of false doctrines “to tyrannize the masses and form herds.” I whispered out loud in Suzzallo Library, “Right on, Nietzsche!”

  Even in Bible college I had silently wondered about the disparity between Paul’s writings and the Gospels about Jesus. Since Paul never knew Christ, and the Gospels had not been written yet, his only real knowledge of Jesus hinged on a celestial voice he had heard on the road to Damascus. After that, he muscled his way into the tiny sect with his own interpretation of Christianity and wrested control of the movement from Christ’s original followers. In the Gospels, Jesus taught in simple parables, broke the commandments, and tore down organized religion. In the Epistles, Paul taught complicated theology, created laws, and reestablished the kind of religion Jesus had condemned. To me, simple literary criticism made it clear that placing the Gospels in the same text with Paul’s letters was like attaching The Bhagavad Gita to Mein Kampf.

  It was time to take Christianity and send it to the morgue, I thought—to a huge armory-sized room, its floors spotless and sterilized and lined with stainless steel tables, filled with small machines for extracting and drilling, severing and plucking. Along the tables would be enlightened seminary students, eight to each side—celestial surgeons trying to bring a corpse back to life. These theological students would be charged with resurrecting the religion of Christianity from its entombment by the apostle Paul—isolating the oxymoronic tumors of his religious dogma and excising these malignant tissues from the body of Christ’s original message.

  But unfortunately for Jesus, I thought, Constantine had won the battle of history in AD 312, and Paul’s books had been attached to the canon to contaminate the rest of the batch. And then it was all over, what with the patriarchal Catholic priesthood taking charge in the fourth century and all the testosterone that subsequently pulsed its way down through history. Testosterone seemed the culprit responsible for more than sixteen hundred years of grief, and I was happy to keep a safe distance from the menacing hormone.

  Then, during the winter quarter, my worldview received a decided jolt. That morning, I hurried toward UW’s Kane Hall in a rotten mood. Christmas break had been too short, and I’d made a real blunder. During vacation I had decided to get my hair permed, and during the procedure I’d forgotten to tell the beautician how quickly it curled; as a result, the rods stayed in too long, and I left the salon looking like Shirley Temple. The first day of class, I pulled the ringlets back and consoled myself—at least I wouldn’t have to worry about any of my male classmates getting too friendly. My hibernating heart was contented to stay that way.

  That I’d signed up for American History 201 irritated me even more than my awful hairdo. Survey classes were inevitably packed with whispering freshmen, although they did have some advantages. At the 200 level they were usually easier, so if you could put up with the swarm of underclassmen, it was a painless A. I entered the top of the amphitheater lecture hall and started down the stairs amid a throng of young bodies. As the new mob entered, several hundred twenty-year-olds squeezed up the steps to get out, while others milled around below for a chance to talk to the professor.

  Then I saw him, walking below on the ground level of the auditorium. Long gray hair fell down his back in a ponytail of soft curls; khakis hugged his exquisite thighs as he moved between sorority beauties and looming athletes, looking for something. This handsome old hippie appeared completely misplaced in the sea of academia. I stopped dead in my tracks; a freshman crashed into my back. “What a beautiful janitor,” I whispered. My heart slapped wildly against my chest. Amazing—it still works! I thought.

  Some people have an acute sixth sense, while others are hopeless failures at anything vaguely intuitive. There are rare times when I feel it. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, zap!—I know that I’m walking into something that’s about to shake up the whole present direction of things. I felt it the moment I saw the stunning, longhaired custodian standing there. An uncontrollable trembling ran along my skin, traveling up my spine and down each limb, bouncing off my fingertips and toes. In those instances, the body knows you’re in deep trouble a long time before your brain catches up. At that moment I was wondering what my body knew that it hadn’t yet conveyed to my mind.

  I reached up and tugged at my hair, trying to straighten out little tufts of it before slipping into a desk behind a football player. Okay, I thought, it doesn’t really matter if this stunning specimen spots me or not. But remaining incognito was a matter of pride—I didn’t want a gorgeous man like him to see me resembling a poodle. If I slumped down long enough, surely he would find his broom and leave. At that moment he discovered what he was looking for: a piece of chalk. He grabbed it and began writing the outline for our first lecture on the board. When he finished and turned to face us, his hazel eyes pierced the crowd with a kind intensity. The older woman next to me gasped and sat up. I leaned toward her and whisper
ed, “Is this guy a babe, or what?”

  “My God, tomorrow I’m sitting closer,” she said, sighing.

  Dr. Taylor turned out to be an expert in his field of American history. He’d earned a national reputation as a rigorous scholar and a superb teacher, with theories as unconventional as his appearance. Even more impressive, he had a teaching style that made History 201 intellectually challenging. When Dr. Taylor entered the lecture hall, there wasn’t a whispering freshman in the room. He spoke with passion, yet he often paused to ask if there were any questions, letting even academic peons like us know that he thought we could reason. I started reading my textbooks over and over so that I could come up with good comments to make in class. For a week I washed my hair twice a night and smothered it with enough conditioner to caulk the bathtub. Then I began making excuses to visit Dr. Taylor during his office hours. He was shy but attentive and kind, with a quiet, gentle voice that made me tingle inside every time he spoke. I conveniently assumed that since he didn’t wear a wedding ring or mention his wife in class, he didn’t have one. I made it a point not to ask. When I heard his graduate students talking about him in the halls, I’d linger, noting that they always repeated a variation on the same story: besides being a brilliant historian, he also went out of his way to help anyone in need of assistance.

  After class I would go down to the front and question him about the New Deal, the California Doctrine, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act. While he answered, I’d stand as close as I respectfully dared, to memorize his face and the wild gray ringlets of his hair, smell the scent of his skin, letting the details of him breathe life back into my body. I started to wallow in an ocean of desire for Dr. Taylor, luxuriating in his words and mannerisms like a fixated teenager. I felt as if he stood at the center of the universe and that the most important things the world had to offer fell from his lips. I read all the books he had written (which were plenty) and felt warm and happy inside, even in the middle of a dreary Seattle February.