Chapter One is linked here.
“Thicc” isn’t an aesthetic category in the ‘90s. Instead, we’ve got Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington. We’ve got the Thigh Master and fat-free diet plans. And the problem is that I’m an athlete and I spend hours each day boxing out big women underneath the basket so I can grab the ball and run down to the other end of the court. At lunchtime I try to restrain myself at Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat buffet, but my appetite evokes commentary from Jeremy and the boys. It doesn’t help that I guzzle lots of carbs on the weekends, either. So, an entire year of arroyo nights and two-a-day basketball practice goes by and I arrive at my sophomore year twenty-five pounds heavier. No more sharing clothes with Kristi.
I’ve also gained a reputation for being a slut. Because I’m tall and I look older than my age, seniors line up to date me. The attention is exhilarating, but I do want to remain a good girl and stay a virgin until I’m married. Yet after a few red plastic cups of tequila sunrise at a given house party, I come dangerously close to abandoning those goals when I let the boys fondle my breasts and put their hands down my panties.
Inside I’m adrift in an ocean of sadness. The pain seems elastic, growing larger and larger within me. I’m terrifically lost and full of rage.
And I can’t pinpoint the solution. I only know that I loathe taking up more physical space. I feel unfeminine and swollen like a wound. My self-worth, beauty, and general significance to the Universe have an inverse relationship with the scale. And the rumors that I’m a skank don’t help.
I can’t run to my mom for help because she’s wrapped up in her third husband, a man 12 years younger than her. To make it even stranger, he’s also a friend from our childhood. Back before my parents ever divorced, he and his mother--a compulsive and controlling woman with a vast constellation of moles on her neck--attended the same holy roller church we belonged to. I still have a picture of us three kids in corduroy pants and striped tees, huddled together to say cheese for the camera.
I don’t know how they reconnected after her divorce from James was final, but what I know is that Kevin’s back in her life with those same admiral blue eyes and, now, a goatee. He never lets us see her in their home, probably because he’s fastidious and controlling like his mother and can’t stand that Jake and I, subject to gravity as we are, leave butt prints on the sofa. A distant relative once visited Kevin and Heidi’s place, saw a pair of shoes kicked off by the door, and declared the kicks to be art with a capital A.)
So, in order to see me, a few months into the school year she invites me to the diner next to the Christian bookstore where she works. The glass door swings open and chimes as I enter it. There she is, all smiles, and my shields go up immediately.
Hi honey, she beams.
Hey, I spit out, eyes downcast, as I scoot into the pleather booth.
You look nice this morning. Come here and let me hug your neck, she says.
That’s okay, I say, unfolding my napkin and placing it in my lap as an excuse.
Alright, she says and keeps the smile painted on while opening the menu.
We order food and I contemplate her across the table as I sip grapefruit juice. It hits me that each husband requires a new wardrobe. With James, it was plaid button-down blouses from L.L. Bean and hair spun up in an effortless chignon. Now as Kevin’s wife she looks androgynous and juvenile. She’s sitting across the booth in a tee with Disney characters and her hair’s dyed red and pinned tightly behind her ears in a low pony. She’s also put on weight and heavier than she’s ever been, and I know that’s because he likes her that way.
I loathe her appearance; it’s like seeing your favorite movie star in an unflattering role but worse because this is real life and a person’s supposed to keep something consistent--if not their surname then their face, if not their husband then their hair. Her look is a symbol of how she’s abandoned me, as if all my childhood memories of her golden locks and treble clef curves are hidden away and now replaced with this cuddly, boyish pal for the repressed kid in her new man.
Her history of husbands, it’s stuffed into the diner booth with us like an obese woman trying to appear dainty, like me trying to appear dainty. The more Mom attempts to draw my attention away from that obesity with honeyed smiles and compliments the more I fixate on the belly of our past.
But we both try to keep it light and talk about basketball camp and my friends, until she pivots the conversation to something Jesusy. I roll my eyes, not because Jesus’s offensive to me, but because I lost Him years before in the divorce like a piece of luggage filled with clothes that don’t fit anymore. I don’t want to open the damn thing and feel nostalgia, not with her. Plus, I can’t make sense of her rekindled romance with Him. With James, Jesus was not much of a presence. At best he seemed to stay two-dimensional, kind and white and pressed onto a flannel board. Now, it’s as if He’s fully incarnated again, traveling with her everywhere. I know it’s because she’s coping with another foolish marriage through her faith. The apple hasn’t fallen very far from the tree, and Kevin’s not too different from his sick-in-the-head mother.
How can I respect that faith when the messages are conflicting? Her marriage to our former playmate; her authenticity eclipsed by a chameleon appearance; her financial woes and the constant assistance from her parents; all of these clash with this renewed spiritual fitness. It seems to me that the God she’s running to is a last resort for the confused and downtrodden, an easy catch. Doesn’t that make Him less of a god?
But then again here I am, clueless and imploding with loneliness. Hiding behind my flint face and detachment is beginning to suffocate me. Yes, I want to reject Mom’s weak-welcoming God and all the prodigality He seems willing to embrace, but the prospect of Him keeps me sitting here with her and all our history.
Then she meekly says, Katherine, I have been praying about you and God spoke to me and wants me to share this with you.
She pulls out a sheet of paper with her lovely arabesque print. And then she slips into the language that fills vacuous devotional materials and the Christian bookstores that sell them, language that’s a blunt knife when what you need is a scalpel to cut out the cancer in your heart, when what you need are heaven’s poets not the world’s parrots. It angers me that I can’t recall a single thing she said to me, so forgettable and failed are the words.
Yet I know now, years later, that their impression, their presence, divides my history into Before and After. They press me into the booth, almost literally. They spread my wings and pin me to the wall like a bug, or like poor Isaiah plucked up by angels and made to eat a scroll. They lay a loving, crushing weight on my chest and press mud over my eyes until I can see. Each syllable rushes over me like an invasion and I want to pound my fists and scream, but I say nothing.
Inside I’m not struggling with Big Questions like the multitude of religions, the mystery of the Trinity, or the authority of Scripture. I’m too young and uninformed to know about those. My knife and fork hover over the bacon and eggs because I don’t know how to swallow the Lamb of God she’s serving. It galls me that this revelation arrives not just in spite of the world’s suffering and folly, but actually through the person who’s brought them so close to me.
But, then again, despite all the pain she’s caused me, she should be the message bearer. She’s always been feeding me the Lamb. Through Jesus songs before bedtime. And through crayoned sketches of stick figures with oval bellies and a smaller person (Jesus) inside of them that showed him ‘living in our hearts.’ She fed him to me when she took me to The Dump in Juarez, Mexico where we handed out white bread pbjs and cartons of milk to orphans. And in our near car accidents when she reached out to stop the velocity of my body and cried out, Jesus! as a prayer of protection. She was always setting the table for me, so why not now?
When she finishes, I point to her God-notes and ask, Did Kevin put you up to this?
Oh no, she answers. This was what I heard God speak to me. This is between us and the Lord only.
Mom, really, I think working at that Christian bookstore’s gone to your head.
She blinks slowly and persists, Katherine, what did you feel when I read this?
It appears I can’t dodge her bullets when the Spirit is helping her aim. So instead I cry over that plate of food, the kind of tears the body releases begrudgingly: motionless, dependent on gravity alone to pull them down, absolutely no heave-ho of the chest allowed.
Finally I say, I hate that t-shirt.
A server approaches our table and she gently waves him off with a smile and shake of the head.
Then silence. Damned silence, or Saved, if I choose it. She’ll wait here until I answer.
I don’t know, Mom! What am I supposed to say?
How did your heart tell you to respond to God’s address?
“Well, he’s God. If he wants to talk to me then I guess I’m going to listen,” I concede.
And then there’s such relief inside, it’s like surfacing from a dive that was too deep just before you blackout. I let her reach across the table and grab my hand, and I even squeeze it back, then quickly get squeamish and release it.
Let’s go. I’m not real hungry anymore, I say, because I want to remove and carry all the emotion-displaying parts of me off to a soft and secret forest where I can gaze at them and caress them, and then give them to this Jesus stranger as a token of friendship, a sign of a new beginning.
Wow, felt that one. Around the time I gave my life to Christ I didn’t want my mom to be right about anything. Who was the first person to know? Yeah, my mom, who was always playing her mushy worship CDs and crying in the car.
So glad it’s not just me!