Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Within three weeks of the start of winter quarter I began awaking each dawn, when even the most extraordinary things seem possible, to the vision of making love with Dr. Taylor on a silk bed, in a warm beach house suffused with summer sea air. White curtains wrestled in the breeze as his long gray curls fell loose around his shoulders. His skin felt damp and hot and tasted of the ocean … Then I’d jump out of bed and into a tepid shower to shock myself out of such a foolish fantasy. I’d seen more than one woman become infatuated with my husband merely from watching him speak. I even knew the clinical name for the phenomenon: transference. The malady was just as potent in higher education; I was sure women fell in love with the exciting Dr. Taylor every quarter. I’d always considered myself miles above such shameless behavior.

  At the end of the term, I slipped a note under his office door, telling him that he was the most intriguing man I had ever known and suggesting that we become lovers. To my wild disappointment, Dr. Taylor didn’t answer my letter. Instead of interpreting his silence as a humane attempt to save me from well-earned humiliation, I stumbled headlong into disaster, telling myself that he must not have gotten the note. Several months later I returned to his office to ask him to sign my copy of his latest book.

  You know the kind of decision people make in badly written horror films, when they are determined to go alone into the empty nineteenth-century three-story mansion where weird screaming noises are heard at night? The entire audience is whistling and throwing popcorn at the screen, hollering, “Don’t go! For the love of God, don’t go!” But the poor deluded souls charge forward, straight into their own version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  When I walked through Dr. Taylor’s door, the gravity of my folly didn’t hit me until the moment he quietly said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to respond to your letter, but I am happily married.” The fact that Dr. Taylor found it necessary to say “happily” revealed plenty. He must have figured that a wild-haired woman like me wouldn’t be dissuaded by the word “married” alone. I would have struck a bargain with the devil to be dead in a ditch rather than standing in Professor Taylor’s office at that moment.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I gasped, turning my horror-stricken face toward the wall lined with volumes of erudite history. Dr. Taylor signed my book, “Best wishes to an excellent student.” I stumbled to my car wondering what, in the name of Jesus, had I just done.

  Thirteen

  Micael: One Who Is Like God

  MY HEART FELT irreparably broken. Besides the shock of such unfamiliar pain, I was astonished at my behavior. Had I completely lost my mind? How could I feel such passion for a man I didn’t even know? On top of my misplaced affection, my impertinence stunned me. Even the positive outcome to my recklessness didn’t seem at all comforting: my actions juxtaposed with Dr. Taylor’s integrity made me realize that predatory behavior wasn’t gender exclusive. Testosterone couldn’t be blamed for all my woes.

  Although the experience helped renew my faith in men and resurrect my lifeless heart, it also reinforced the growing feeling that I’d ceased to hold an honorable place in society. I had become reckless, disenfranchised, unmoored: a single mother on welfare, brazen and foolish enough to throw herself at a married man. In my angst, I began to question whether life held any meaning. Although I agreed with Nietzsche’s assessment of Christianity, I could not bring myself to adopt his nihilistic worldview. I was not willing to equate strength with a Machiavellian show of force or loss of conscience. Although Nietzsche’s existentialism did not appeal to me, I began to appreciate Albert Camus. Like Nietzsche, Camus believed that we’d randomly appeared in an empty universe, with no God or absolutes to guide us. However, unlike Nietzsche, he advocated that humans could cultivate purpose without intruding on the existence of others. Most of Camus’ characters ended up doing right even though they believed that no moral mandate demanded they do so. I decided that by choosing to be kind I could give direction to my life. Though I saw no real reason to be compassionate, for me it was simply better than being a shit. I also felt akin to Camus’ outsider wandering on the fringes of society: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the hope of a Promised Land.”

  I decided that I simply needed to muster the guts to embrace life’s emptiness. I would have to face the fact that I was alone and figure out how to raise my children in such a world. Shackling them with the biblical God just to keep them in line was out of the question. Jehovah was a tyrant and not a deity anyway. One evening, while reading Camus, I came across the lines, “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door.” I’d heard one of my professors refer to the philosophy as skeptical realism, which sounded good to me. Yes, I was an existential skeptical realist. Even if God did exist, He certainly wasn’t going to pay my light bill. This harsh reality meant that I would have to seek every form of public assistance that I could, every welfare check and food stamp, every free counseling session provided by state aid, every scholarship and student loan—and not just the basic government loans, but every penny I could squeeze from PLUS, an unsubsidized loan program contingent on the borrower’s good credit. And so far my plan was working, even though it felt like something held together with pipe cleaners and paste—the work of leprechauns and elves, and all hinging on Doris, who could call at any time and put an end to the whole grand adventure.

  The one thing that kept me from going insane with worry was running. I ran for hours every day. I would set out for a run in the drenching coastal rain, in the wilting, humid heat, at six in the morning, at two in the afternoon, eight at night. I ran because it repressed my anxieties and eased my loneliness, or maybe my hypothermic toes offered the perfect form of physical torture I needed to release my fear. So no matter what the weather, I ran. It was a rush of pure exhilaration when the frigid air burned my lungs with each breath, when the heat bathed my limbs in sheets of perspiration, pumping endorphins into each capillary. I ran as if something were chasing me, just about to catch me and devour me, like the crazed bear in The Night of the Grizzly, which had scared the daylights out of me when I was a kid. There were times when the wind blew me sideways or backward into a ditch or the freezing rain soaked my face until my ears ached and turned bright red, but still I didn’t miss a day. One afternoon in March, the grizzly seemed just at my heels, so I started to chant a new, calming mantra: There is nothing to fear, nothing to fear but fear itself. I ran into the house, and the phone was ringing. I shook myself off like a wet dog. “Hello,” I answered in my relaxed, just-in-from-a-good-run voice.

  “It’s Dawn down at the bank. It seems that there’s a glitch in your credit, and I am so very sorry, but we’re going to have to turn down your PLUS loan application this time.”

  “I can’t believe it, Dawn; I know my credit is good,” I said.

  “I am really sorry. The best thing you can do is get your credit report cleared up and then resubmit the loan application.”

  I let the phone drop as the sweat and rain dripped off my face onto the kitchen linoleum. Surely there’s some crazy mistake, I told myself. I got on the phone and immediately ordered a copy of my credit report. When it arrived a few days later, it showed defaulted debts on both a Visa and a Sears account. In disbelief, I called the companies. Sears informed me that a few months before the divorce, David had obtained a credit card and charged it to the maximum, then walked away from the debt. Although he’d acquired the card without my knowledge, since we were married when he received it, I was liable for the payments. David had also defaulted on his personal Visa. But I felt confident that I could shake that bill because the divorce decree stated that the account was solely his to pay. I called Visa.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brant; even though the divorce decree states it’s his card, since you were married to him when the card was issued, you are still liable for the charges.”

  “But isn
’t a divorce document legally binding?”

  “Not in this circumstance. Unless you pay it or get David to pay it, it will remain on your report.”

  My credit was ruined. I still had a year to go before receiving my bachelor’s degree, and the money available from welfare and government loans wasn’t enough. Without the benefit of the PLUS loan, it would be nearly impossible to continue school. I fought back the tears and set the phone down. Walking upstairs, my feet felt heavy, like wearing galoshes filled with water. I pulled my clothes off and stepped into the shower, where I cried with my head under the stream. After the hot water ran out, I climbed out and sat naked on the lid of the closed toilet, letting the cold water run to hide the sound of my weeping. When I was finally all cried out, I put on my robe and went downstairs to fix dinner.

  That night, after the kids went to bed, I grabbed the Bombay Sapphire from the back of the freezer and walked into the living room where I stared out the picture window at a constellation of stars tangled in the bare black limbs of the Japanese maple. I held the bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. The moon was smothered behind a great, shapeless chalky vapor of clouds. The night seemed darker and longer than at any time in the distant and dismal story of the world. I poured a long drink. I’ll be goddamned, I thought, here I am, watching for a left hook from the Washington State Legislature, and David delivers a blindside knockout in the tenth round. I began emptying the gin, gulp by gulp.

  So what was my new plan? Okay, maybe I should just try and marry myself a Microsoft millionaire. The idea wasn’t so bad. I could give my kids everything they wanted—multiple pairs of Doc Martens, unlimited Little League uniforms, and tuition for Princeton—and for me, European facials, body wraps, Crystal Peel treatments, Fendi handbags, and loads of perennials from Molback’s Nursery. I took another drink. I wondered if this was how cowards felt, or men lost at sea who had given up their struggles and agreed to let the waves take them. Okay, no Microsoft magnate. Maybe I would have a gigantic garage sale and then leave for a faraway island like Minorca, teach English as a second language. I could do translations for money, have tourists stay in the extra rooms of my whitewashed flat surrounded by red geraniums, oleander, and fragrant jasmine—another drink—lie in the sun for days and weeks on end, read Camus and Sartre, and Heidegger. But the kids couldn’t even speak Italian, or whatever it was they spoke on Minorca: French? Spanish? Catalan? Come to think of it, neither could I. Wasn’t that just the way life goes? It was like swimming against a riptide—you hope you’re making progress as you struggle, unable to feel the current pulling you inexorably away. Then you pause to look up at the shore and realize you’re in a place you never intended to be, with no way to get back and no place to go but under.

  At that point the alcohol had completely saturated my limbs, and I could feel myself collapsing into the carpet. I sank into the sorrow as though I were stepping into a pool of the calmest, darkest waters, the surface reaching to my knees, my stomach, the point of my chin—the weight of my body drifting into a great sea of desperation. Each detail of my physical existence was dissolving into a void of hopelessness. I curled into a ball and put my head on my knees.

  Then I suddenly felt Micael’s warm body encircling me, her small face peering into mine. She had come downstairs and found me in a puddle on the floor; now her gentle breath was kissing the tears on my cheeks. “It’s okay, Mom. We’re going to be okay.” Her eyes were awash with love, her face shining with the pure confidence of a child who still believes the world is a place full of hope, full of wonder. Micael stretched her arms around me to hug me tighter, knowing that her mother needed saving and that she was the one to do it. I looked up and saw the darkness around her glowing, moon shaped face. It was a celestial look, the look of grace. My mind said back to me, “This is your evidence of the divine.” In my little daughter’s indomitable spirit was mirrored the Hebrew meaning of her name, Micael: one who is like God.

  I remembered her birth and the births of her siblings: the pink that bloomed onto their pallid lips and ashen cheeks as they squalled out their first breath, the spiritual energy that filled the room as they lay on my still rubbery stomach, the perfect capsules of wonder they were as David cradled them to his chest. At that moment I knew that if the world contained any certainty, it was that my children began and continued as miracles. It was the only faith I held, the only truth that remained, the only sign of God I trusted. My job was to finish the journey for them.

  The next morning I could feel the frantic scramble that pumped too much blood through my heart, inflating the veins in my neck as David’s phone rang and rang. Once he answered it, I simply told him that if he didn’t pay his delinquent bills, after I kicked his ass between his ears, I would sue him for back child support. It took him several months, but he set up a payment schedule with Sears and Visa, and the bank released my PLUS loan.

  I began to realize that something inside me could not close off the universe, reducing all truth to a narrow string of empirical operations, cold as a razor’s edge. Something about life demanded the wild chaos of possibility. The miracle of human existence and our ability to love made me hesitate to abandon all hope of the divine. I could not ignore the spark of light that seemed to dwell deep inside humanity, an ember of something greater than empty flesh and bones. If we evolved from sterile happenstance driven solely by our survival-of-the-fittest instincts, then why do we perform acts of compassion or heroism? What makes a soldier risk his life to save a comrade or causes a child to love unconditionally? The human ability to think in the abstract also suggested to me that we were capable of elevated thought. We could create and admire art, music, and architecture, write and ponder love and the meaning of the universe. That an existentialist could even contemplate life’s folly pointed to the miraculous gift of the imagination—the inexplicable phenomenon of personal consciousness. Dead matter alone seemed unable to account for man’s intellectual creativity and passion. Although I certainly wasn’t ready to embrace religion, I had to acknowledge that stubbornly rejecting all possibility of God displayed the same intolerance I had found in Fundamentalism. Dogma, religious or empirical, ended the pilgrimage of discovery. But I set such daunting thoughts aside—midterms were coming, and I had plenty to worry about just trying to pass chemistry.

  The process became easier the next time Doris sent me scrambling to the university to retrieve more documents, and a new counselor stepped up to the desk. “This information is completely unnecessary,” he said. “Does she do this every six months?”

  “Yes,” I answered, and then gave him a brief account of Doris’s behavior.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the welfare office. “Can I speak to your director?”

  In the discussion that followed, he used the word “harassment” more than once, and after that I was assigned a new caseworker, and no one at the welfare office mentioned the doom of impending legislation ever again. My heart felt as if someone had taken it down from the ledge it had been teetering on since Doris threw it up there.

  That spring I was accepted to do graduate work at the University of Washington’s Department of Communications, and once I started the program I felt relaxed and at home. Instead of attending class with frat brothers and sorority sisters, I was studying with adults my age—a few were even parents, and one was a single mom. A group of us began to meet once a week for dinner at the Big Time Brewery, where the in-house microbrews were as varied as my classmates. Jennifer had taken her undergraduate degree at Stanford, Kyle at Iowa State, Carol came from Florida State, Beth from Dartmouth, Brad from USC, Donna from UCLA, and a whole slew of us from the U of W.

  August had tapered off into the brisk days of September. After classes we’d gather at the pub, around a sticky table in the soft, layered light that filtered through the windows. Breathing the crisp smell of hard apple cider and hops, we would drink our Bhagwan’s Best IPA and discuss Spike Lee, Pulp Fiction, which professors we wanted on our graduat
e committees, our class readings of Marshall McLuhan and Michel Foucault, and whether we had lovers. A new exuberance overtook me. It felt like moving into a new house—first you paint the living room a fresh cream color, watching the roller smooth across old dirt and gashes, eradicating the past into clean oblivion; you carry in the boxes of books and decide where you will put them. You position the furniture, fill the pantry with cans and jars and sacks of flour, and the newly lined drawers with brand-new kitchen towels. You make a batch of bread and pull it, fresh and warm, from the oven to fill the house with its smell.

  I relished my new life, attending evening lectures or the theater, expressing my opinions on movies, elected officials, historical events, religion, sex, and the time of day with no concern about who might object, knowing that other than my children, I didn’t have to take care of anyone. Instead of seeing the future as a black tangle of thread, I felt it was starting to weave into a hopeful pattern. I didn’t know what that pattern was going to look like, but it was a pattern. I thought about Rachael, who years before had left the Hutterite colony and moved into town. I remembered seeing in her face the pure joy of liberation; it was breathtaking, almost intoxicating. I now understood what I had seen in her eyes so many years before: once a mind has been set free, it would rather be destroyed than return to captivity.

  I chose a fine communications historian named Richard Kielbowicz as chair of my graduate committee and began doing research for my master’s thesis on Teddy Roosevelt and the newspaper press. During the next two years Dr. Kielbowicz spent hours critiquing my work and teaching me the rules of rigorous historical research, sending me back to the library over and over to dig deeper and read more, forcing me to scrutinize the details of turn-of-the-century journalism and T.R. Before I knew it, I had spent two years in the university library, scouring newspapers, magazine articles, microfiche, and journals, taking notes among the dusty stacks of books. Although I loved every tedious minute of it, I was nonetheless relieved when my final semester arrived. As I placed my completed thesis in the mailboxes of the five professors on my graduate committee, joy overwhelmed me—tempered by the fact that within a few days I would be sitting before them, defending my research.