This is the sixth weekly release of my memoir manuscript. If you’re new here, start at the first chapter.
When I lay out the chapter I wrote about my parent’s romance for my dad to read, he can’t give it his stamp of approval.
It’s beautifully written, he says, but no, we didn’t meet at church. And no, we didn’t connect over the existential questions of King Solomon. It was much simpler than that.
I was an immature, 19-year old kid at university, he begins.
It’s rare that he lets me into this history. Ever since things fell apart between them decades ago, he hasn’t said much about her. He’s very forthcoming about a variety of hurts and failures in his past, but about her he’d rather not poke the scar tissue. (I used to think this was unfair, stingy of him to deny me the details of their love and falling out. But lately I’ve grown suspicious of people who speak glibly about their past traumas as if practicing transparency is the same as vulnerability. It’s not. I know it because I’ve tried to do the same thing.) Yet now, knowing that her silence leaves me with no other source of information than my own imagination, he kindly indulges me.
I didn’t attend very many classes, he tells me with his signature frankness.
But one morning he’s walking across the University of Texas-El Paso’s campus, resolved to make it to English 101 at least once a week, when she appears walking the other direction. She’s got a t-shirt on that reads “100% Natural” and her bell bottoms fit nice and snug. She stops him and the headache he’s been fighting off from last night’s beer guzzle takes an unexpected intermission.
You’re Rick, right? she says through peachy lip gloss. Her eyes glitter green, her Farrah Fawcett hair bounces.
He doesn’t have context for her at all.
We both go to Trinity, she says, hoping that will help him make the connection. (Trinity is the Methodist church both their white, upper-middle class families attend.)
Oh yeah, he feigns and then tries to smile and relax his pinched face.
Are you thirsty? she asks, as if it’s the most natural thing to say to someone you’ve never met after forcefully introducing yourself.
He’s totally thrown off and there’s a lengthy, awkward pause. The horizon seems to tilt, and grasping for straws he wonders if his hangover’s left him looking sick and dehydrated. She shifts the guitar she’s carrying, causing the strap to bisect and accentuate her perky breasts.
She gestures towards the cafeteria and picks up the conversation again. I mean, do you want to get a Coke or something?
And then, I can just see it, she smiles that smile I’ve seen a thousand times, a smile that even now lights up the nursing home she lives in, a smile that seems to erase a tiny bit of the fracture line that runs through our broken cosmos.
His pupils dilate and his better angels say, No! English class! Remember English class! But she’s so unexpected and centripetal and symmetrical that his chin tips towards his chest and he lets out a defeated chuckle.
Sure, he caves, If you’re buyin’. And that’s how Dad says that my family begins.
But did she talk about God at all when you were dating? I ask him.
She had more exposure to charismatic Christianity than I did, he shares, but it wasn’t like she walked around saying, ‘Hey guys, I’m off to a Bible study.’ It didn’t guide her behavior in those early years at all.
And the evidence agrees. They were pregnant in just a few short months, so obviously the sexual purity that is so intrinsic to evangelicalism (and incumbent upon its female adherents) hadn’t kicked in yet. Which of course doesn’t mean she didn’t believe in Jesus. But still, I’m left trying to connect my early memories of her godliness, her insistence that Jesus was another member of our household, with this young, sensual woman.
So here’s what I’ve got: my mother was godly and seductive. Inside her 5’4” frame both qualities coexisted. She was King David dancing with abandon before God. She was King David lusting on a moonlit rooftop. Inside of her, those energies were mixing and separating, waxing and waning, and I felt them as a child but of course I couldn’t name them or parse them out.
Truthfully, even as an adult I’m dazzled at how she traded in such opposing forces. Godliness, in its raw form, is so awe-full and so other that when people encounter it their first reaction is to cower and take cover. We want to be rid of it like poor Isaiah when he saw the Lord on the throne. We wail with him, “Woe is me, I am unclean! I am undone!”
But the other quality, seduction, has the opposite effect. Instead of overwhelming and repelling, it attracts and welcomes us. It encourages us to bare all, press palm to palm, lip to lip, and commune. It pulls us in with the sweet honey of being known.
In her sky both constellations take shape and it’s haunted me my whole life that those powers live inside her at the same time, that I originated from them, might even possess them myself. It would be easier if she lived by one or the other, easier to defend myself or open myself. But what she required of me, what she requires of me still, is to do both, and that is its own exquisite kind of torture–always guessing at whether to build a wall or knock it down, at whether I should cover my eyes or cleanse my mouth with a hot coal, always guessing at what will brim over in my mother—undeniable, earthly fecundity or the next divine revelation.