Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (5 page)

After Annie, Teddy, Jerry, Sherman, Brad, Steven, Sargent, and Harry have their mandatory chats with Santa, it’s our turn. “Mimi and Lucia!” Santa says. Everyone starts clapping when Santa gestures to his lap. Mimi and I are both thinking we are too old for this, but we walk sheepishly up and take a seat. He hands us each a present, which we rip open: new Lilly Pulitzer bikinis.

It is almost
midnight. I am lying in my bed, under the white eyelet canopy, reflecting on the wonderful Christmas Eve we have just had. After Santa left, all the cousins went swimming (except for Olivia, Sarah, and Tristin, who didn’t want to put on their new bathing suits) while the grown-ups exchanged family gifts. The boys played Perry Mason—Woodhill Country Club’s version of
Marco Polo—and Mimi and I tried to teach Annie how to bump butts underwater, by holding hands and pressing the soles of our feet against each other’s. Annie couldn’t do it because she needed one hand to hold her nose, so we taught her somersaults instead.

At ten-thirty, Uncle Bear put his thumb and forefinger to his mouth and whistled. “Everybody out. Time to go home. Grandma has something for you!”

There was a commotion while some of us stood, dripping at the side of the pool, shivering and blue-lipped, and waited for the others to get out. Uncle Bear helped Grandma dole out her presents. (I’ve noticed that he, of the three sons-in-law, is particularly sweet with her.) The identical packages were bulky, soft, wrapped in dark green tissue, and tied with thick, red and white yarn bows. If we weren’t all freezing, we might not have appreciated the gifts right away: giant green plush beach towels, with our last names embroidered at one end in block letters. There were three
EWINGS
, three
ERICKSONS
, three
BOWMANS
, and four
JOHNSONS
.

There is a
light rap on my bedroom door, and Olivia pokes her head in. “C’mon, let’s go,” she whispers. I kick off my covers and hop to the floor. It doesn’t seem late enough to go snooping for presents. Mom and Dad might still be awake, but Olivia’s timing has always been right in the past.

We tiptoe toward Sherman’s room, wearing our matching Christmas flannel nighties, which have that new, sour smell. Olivia is about to knock on Sherman’s door when we hear our father’s voice, muffled, behind the master bedroom door. Olivia looks at me, her eyes suddenly big. She smiles nervously and covers her mouth with her hand, and I’m afraid I might erupt in giggles and then we’ll be caught. Olivia’s index finger goes up. “Shhh,” she mimes.

Now Mom is talking. I strain to hear her.

“Those weren’t
exactly
his words,” Mom says in a low voice. I’m not sure what I detect in her voice. Is it a soothing quality? Defensiveness?

“Pretty close,” our father snaps back, just above a whisper. Olivia and I stand there. My heart is pounding now. We thought we were going to wake up Sherman and hunt for hidden Christmas presents, but instead, curiosity draws us closer to our parents’ bedroom door. Like spies, we are eavesdropping, and it feels dangerous. I go from titillation to fear.

“He called it
quackery
,” Dad says bitterly.

Olivia motions to me with her head, and, wasting no time, we return to our end of the dark hallway. Outside my room, I want to ask my sister about what I heard, but she rushes past me to her room and silently closes her door. I go back to my bed and pull the covers up to my chin. All of a sudden, I feel sort of queasy.

I have never heard that word, but I can tell from the way my father said it that it isn’t good.
Quackery
. It is an insult, a sharp one, not at all Christmasy. I wonder what it means. I stare at the canopy over my bed and try to commit the word to memory. In the morning, before we head to Ammie and Grandpa’s for Christmas Day with Dad’s family, I’ll want to sneak into Dad’s study and find the word in his unabridged Webster’s dictionary.

Sleep drifts into my room, surrounding me with warmth. My eyes close, my breathing slows, and with each gentle exhale the word I must remember tiptoes away.

One Friday afternoon
, a week after my twelfth birthday, Sherman and I pile into the backseat of our mother’s yellow station wagon.

“Aren’t you nervous?” Sherman asks. He is nine.

“No,” I lie.

I am about to have my ears pierced by Uncle Jack. He’s a plastic surgeon. Mimi says he does lots of boob jobs and nose jobs, but once he reattached a woman’s ear after her horse bit it off. Mimi had her ears pierced by Uncle Jack last month, since she’s four weeks
older than me. Sarah and Olivia had theirs done when they turned twelve. Very soon I will be sitting at my uncle’s kitchen table just like they all did.

I know that the five-minute procedure will make me look older a lot faster and more permanently than anything else (short of a boob job, ha-ha), and since I look like twelve-going-on-nine, I’ll take all the help I can get. Still, I’m scared. I’ve never been stuck with a needle, at least not for as long as I can remember. I had vaccinations before I turned three, but none since then, because of the Christian Science exemption. I’ve even been excused, for religious reasons, from the routine eye exams given by the school nurse. The last time I went to the doctor was before my parents became Christian Scientists, when I was a toddler.

Uncle Jack’s house is on the other side of town. Aunt Helen greets us at the front door. She is my godmother, which doesn’t really mean anything anymore. She became my godmother when I was born, and she signs my birthday card “with love, your godmother” every May 4. But Christian Scientists don’t have godparents, because Christian Scientists don’t baptize. I got baptized when we were still regular Christians.

“Are you nervous?”
Aunt Helen asks.

“Not really,” I lie, my heart pounding. My head is swirling with a new and uncomfortable awareness of the difference between the way my family does things and the way other people do. It strikes me, all of a sudden, as weird, and maybe complicated, that my mother is a Christian Scientist and her brother is a plastic surgeon. Then it dawns on me that maybe
we
are weird. Maybe almost everyone in the world goes to doctors.

I sit on a kitchen stool, shoulders squared. I pull my hair back into a ponytail. Grandma takes my right hand in both of hers, which are warm and powdery soft.

Uncle Jack wraps a towel around my shoulders, like he’s a barber.
I face straight ahead, but I am watching his every movement, biting my lip.

I feel something wet and cold, first on my right earlobe, then on my left. The cool turns icy. I hold my head totally still.

“What’s that, Uncle Jack?” I ask.

“I’ve just cleaned your ears with rubbing alcohol. They should feel a little cool. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when I’m about to do something.”

Relieved that the drips aren’t blood, I move a bit on the stool, pull away from Grandma’s grasp, and sit on both hands.

“Ready?” Uncle Jack asks.

“Yes.”

“First, you’ll feel a little pinch. That’s the Novocain. It takes a few minutes to kick in. Then, I’ll pierce the lobes, but you shouldn’t feel anything. Your ears will be numb.”

Uncle Jack stands six foot seven. Right now, I’m not looking in the mirror. We are eyeball to belt buckle. I feel him tug on one ear, then the other.

“There.”

“Are you done?” I ask.

“Take a look in the mirror,” Uncle Jack says. I see him wink at Mom and Grandma.

I slide off the stool and approach the mirror on the wall. I see two enormous needles—more like
poles
—sticking through my earlobes. Blood is dripping all over my toweled shoulders. My uncle laughs. I don’t. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

I climb back onto the stool. Mom takes a closer look at the needles sticking out of my two ears and says to my uncle that the placement is fine.

“Jo, separate the earrings from the posts, will you, and stick them in the alcohol,” Uncle Jack says.

In Sunday school I have learned that there is no such thing as germs. Nevertheless, my mom, like the nurse on
Marcus Welby, M.D
. (forbidden viewing at our house, so I have to be sneaky about
watching it), obediently plops the shiny bits of gold into the dish of alcohol, swishing the dish around before handing it to Uncle Jack. In less than a minute, the earrings and their posts are pinched into place. Uncle Jack wipes the blood from my earlobes with another damp cotton ball.

“There,” he says, “
now
take a look.” He winks at me this time and pats my shoulder.

I hop off the stool again and approach the mirror. This time I see a blood-blotched towel on my shoulders and a pair of pink, puffy lobes with gold ball earrings. My ears are
pierced
. And almost magically, I can’t feel them at all.

“Thanks, Uncle Jack.”

“Your mom will pick up some rubbing alcohol at the drugstore. I want you to clean your ears every morning when you get up, then after school, and finally before you go to bed at night. Like this.”

He picks up a cotton ball and saturates it with alcohol. Then he squeezes the ball gently so that little drops plop into his palm. “Wipe the cotton ball around the back and front of each earlobe. Then tilt your head, and let the alcohol drip right onto the earring, so that it gets through to the puncture. You should do this for two weeks. And twist each earring once around before every cleaning. It will sting a little. Other than that, try not to fiddle with them, or they may get infected. Okay?”

I am still smiling at my reflection, but now I’m sort of worried. What if rubbing alcohol is against Christian Science?

“What if they do?” I ask. “You know, get infected?”

Uncle Jack pauses and looks at Mom. “If you clean them carefully like I showed you, they shouldn’t. But if they do, you call me, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. I wonder how I will know.

I walk out to the driveway, where all the kids are, relieved that the ear piercing is behind me.

Sherman comes over to inspect my ears, but the cousins don’t. They’re used to this.

“Do they hurt?” Sherman asks with a squeamish smirk.

“Can’t even feel them,” I say, running my finger along the edge of one ear, still amazed at the power of Novocain.

Sherman leans the bicycle toward me and asks if I want a turn. I eye the jump, get on the banana-seated, high-handlebarred bicycle, and take a warm-up loop before heading toward the ramp.

I can’t figure
out why everyone—Grandma, Aunt Helen, Sherman, the cousins—is standing over me. I’m not sure where I am. I feel odd, not
right
, like I’m in the narrowest part of a giant funnel into which everything—the trees, my uncle’s house, the driveway—is being poured, speeding by me on all sides.

I can see Uncle Jack squatting beside me. He is holding my wrist, looking at his watch. Mom is kneeling on my other side, squeezing my other hand. Grandma is standing above me, right hand over her mouth. I hear Aunt Helen scolding her boys about the jump. She sounds impossibly far away, but I see that she is right here.

“I think she fainted because of her ears,” Sherman says. But Harry tells Uncle Jack that the high handlebars gave way just as I flew into the air, throwing me headfirst over the bicycle and onto the concrete driveway.

“I hope she doesn’t have a concussion,” Grandma says, speaking softly to my uncle. She looks worried. I’ve never heard the word
concussion
before. It sounds serious. Tension seems to be hovering over me, like a ghost, around Uncle Jack, Grandma, and Mom.

“I want you to follow my index finger,” Uncle Jack says, slowly drawing his hand from right to left in front of my face. “How do you feel, Lucia?”

I don’t know how I should answer him. I look up to my mother. I can tell she is praying: her eyes focus on an imaginary point between my face and hers. I feel dizzy.

Uncle Jack looks into my eyes, and his hands move lightly over my scalp. I wince as he finds the far edge of my right eyebrow. Then I feel a sharp ache, mellowing to a throb, somewhere above my hairline.

I look to my uncle, and it occurs to me that maybe they all think I can’t hear them, or am too startled to answer. I know how I feel: like I’m being looked at under a microscope. I’m scared, my head hurts, and I think I might get sick. I need to lie back down. The pebbles on the driveway cut into my elbow.

I’m so scared I start to pray. I can’t be hurt. I can’t be sick. I can’t feel pain. I am a child of God, made in God’s perfect image. I reflect all of God’s qualities: perfection, love, harmony, health. I don’t have to be afraid because God is taking care of me.

Still, I am terrified. I know my mother can tell. She squeezes my hand gently.

“Should we go home?” she asks. It’s not a question; it’s a statement. But I’m wondering to myself if we should go home. Part of me wants to stay here, close to Uncle Jack, who would know how to take care of me.

Mom says, “Here, let’s get you to your feet.”

Uncle Jack cautions me to get up slowly, to rest for a moment in a sitting position.

Grandma, Uncle Jack, and Aunt Helen walk with us to the station wagon. I wonder what they’re thinking. Does Grandma think I have a concussion? Does Uncle Jack think he should take me to the hospital? Does Aunt Helen wonder if maybe my uncle should take charge? I’m sure Mom wishes Dad were here. Sherman self-consciously walks beside me, taking my elbow, and I can tell he is scared too.

Can people die from concussions?

Many times I have imagined something just like this: I have an accident, or get some disease, and everyone feels sorry for me and does nice things, like sending me get-well cards and bringing me stuffed animals. But the very idea of get-well cards is shunned in Christian Science (a get-well card for someone who is already God’s perfect child, illness-free?). This isn’t fun at all. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.