Chapter 22: Whack-a-Mole

At 17, I’m bleach-blonde and pious as an old church lady. It drives my brother mad, and it wounds him, though I don’t realize it. 

Later, as an adult, he’d explain that my move into Christian fundamentalism left him feeling abandoned. Because, despite the fact that during our adolescence he’d pinned me down and drooled on me and made fun of my itty bitty titties, he believed we were meant to stick together through the carnage of divorce. From the first day we’d loaded our suitcases in Dad’s trunk for the inaugural joint custody weekend, Jake saw us traveling together through our family’s death in lockstep. 

In contrast, I’d felt the bleak path was only wide enough for two feet at a time. This might’ve been because Jake was Pro-Dad and I was, in my own tortured way, pro-Mom. But more likely it was that I was too proud to lean into a co-sufferer’s love. It's a character deformity that cripples me to this day.  

All of this is why, one weekend, he fervently begs me to cancel my Friday night Luby’s Cafeteria date with Granny and Gramps. He wants me to stay home for the house party he wasn’t supposed to be throwing while my Dad and stepmom are away. 

Jake sees through my plans. He knows that the Blue Plate Special is my way of avoiding the debauchery. He knows that if I go out to eat, I’ll slip in the garage door later under the cover of blaring rap and make it to my bedroom right under their shit-faced noses, stealth-like, unseen.  

So he begs, says I don’t even have to drink, but just stay. And I don’t know why, but I crater. Like crater crater, booze and all. 

The whole evening is tinged with the hilarity and exhilaration of doing something completely off-limits in the most familiar of all spaces: your home. I drink keg beer out of my Dad’s favorite Houston Astros tumbler. I mash faces with a boy right up against the polyester blend of my living room couch. I wretch in the bathroom where I get ready for school each day, which is nice because I’m able to quickly brush my teeth and go straight to bed.

I wake up with the very definite sense that should I be struck by lightning at this precise moment I would certainly burn in hell. And is it just me or are my pants immediately tighter? 

From that weekend, my spiritual strictures begin to unravel. Some colossal craving surfaces in my behaviors, and as much as I try to squash it, it resurfaces somewhere else in a great game of whack-a-mole.

For example, I’m delighted when my dad wants to join me for lap swimming before school. But when he asks to stop at Circle K to grab a poor man’s cappuccino, I don’t flee from the carby French Vanilla hooch. Instead, I fill my cup and greedily suck it down, only to be stricken with the deepest guilt.

Then I meet a boy at youth camp who is broad shouldered and tender hearted, and I fall for him with a great big thunk. And some months later, even though I’ve been warned from the pulpit that premarital sex is an abomination, his brown eyes disarm me and I sleep with him in a dingy hotel room by the side of the interstate.

I pray my guts out each Sunday during altar time. I make deals with God. But even after I’ve been dumped by Mr. Youth Camp, and sorely used by the next guy, and am ten pounds heavier from the cappuccino trips with Dad, I haven’t learned whatever lesson is needed to get back on the straight and narrow. 

One Sunday at Luby’s as I’m sliding my tray past a stoplight of custard dishes filled with red, yellow, and green Jello, Barbara asks me what’s wrong.

I say nothing until we scoot into our roller seats at a formica table--me, Gramps, and Granny--and what I focus on is Mom.

‘So Mom’s actually, finally leaving Kevin?’ I scoff. ‘I can’t say I’m sad about it, but still--that makes Marriage #3 a failure, too.’

These words are darts flung at Barbara as much as they are reflections on a third person not present. I’m angry with Grandma for encouraging Mom to marry Kevin in the first place. She had projected her own values on Heidi, believing her daughter could only be happy when secure in a marriage. And, practically speaking, Grandma had been subsidizing my mom’s expenses since she’d divorced James.  That got expensive. So when Kevin came around, she saw him as the solution.

Grandma’s face turns sour and she tsks through her teeth as her tiny fingers work a buttering knife over a roll. ‘Yes, it appears so,’ she concedes.

Grandpa looks at me and raises his eyebrows but tucks into his Salisbury steak as a way of avoiding the conversation.

‘So she’ll live in your townhouse again?’ I ask, thinking of the old crashpad Jake, Chip, and I had used after our drunken arroyo night. ‘She needs to finish college,’ I proceed, picking up an old chorus I’ve sung for years now.

‘She needs to get a job,’ Barbara replies, and pecks at her bread.

‘She can finish college and get a job,’ I retort, ‘And she doesn’t need a man.’

Of course, focusing on Mom like this is psychological deflection. But on a deeper level, it’s evidence of spiritual ferment. I haven’t grown more empathetic to her struggles because of my own. I’ve cut down a larger tree to replace the branch that was already planted in my green eyes.

That’s just plain old-fashioned sin. But the Fundamentalism I am gripped by doesn’t help anything, either. Fundamentalism says that rigid rules and self-discipline are the only solutions. Which means that Mom’s supposed to resist the easy path of another Band-Aid Man and money from her parents. And I’m supposed to reject another sugary cappuccino with Dad, another handsome liar in the night.

Now, anyone who’s given St. Paul a hot minute to explain the mechanics of salvation will know that keeping the rules is damn impossible, or else what’s the purpose of Grace? 

But setting that aside, I’m really just a kid begging her mom to behave. And I never say it to myself, but I believe it. I believe that if she can’t behave, that if she can’t be an adult, it’s because I am not worthy of being loved this way. And if I’m not worthy of being loved this way, maybe I can’t behave again, either. 

From God to me to Mom. I’m caught up like that office desk tchotchke with three silver balls suspended on a beam. Lift one outside ball, let it strike the middle ball, and the force will send the opposite ball flying. The physics of judgment swing back and forth, back and forth. And deep inside me the screw of shame gets turned tighter and tighter, bolting me to a lonely, embittering, useless crucifix I won’t come down from for another decade.