Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (7 page)

Each time we meet Olivia’s plane, I harbor a vague feeling that I won’t recognize my own sister, but there she is, walking down the jetway. A sense of relief washes over me. Only two things about Olivia look different: She has a long, tiny braid on either side of her face. And now she’s taller than Mom. She drops her backpack to give us each a hug. I wonder briefly if I’ll ever catch up to her.

Late Wednesday night, after everyone else has gone to bed, I sit with Olivia on her bed, and she makes two tiny braids for me while we listen to her new Stevie Wonder album. We don’t talk much. She plays “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away,” on low volume, lifting the needle delicately and setting it back precisely on the wide groove at the beginning of the song, over and over again. Olivia knows every word, and her voice is rich and low, and I wish I could sing like she does. I hear the unhurried rhythm, and Stevie Wonder’s voice overlaid with hers, and even though the song is about God and the cosmos and being black, to me it voices a universal sorrow and—somehow—my own unexpected, blurry longing.

We page through the Principia yearbook together, and Olivia points out all her friends; I can almost see their faces beneath the loopy, smudged ballpoint scrawl and scratch of various hands, the
i
’s with tiny circles or hearts for dots. A lot of them are seniors now; Olivia has always preferred the company of older people. She calls most of Mom’s and Dad’s friends by their first names, not Mr. and Mrs. the way Sherman and I do.

Sometimes when Olivia talks about life at Principia, I try to
insert myself into the picture, but I’m not sure boarding school is for me.

In the morning, we go to church, where Dad leads the service, because now he is the First Reader, which is sort of a big deal. (Everybody knows us now, which is annoying. Sherman, Olivia, and I have to shake hands with people after church, and it takes twice as long to get to the car and go home.) When Dad invites the congregation to stand and testify, I watch Olivia move to the edge of her seat a couple of times, putting both of her hands on the pew in front of her. Has she had a healing at Principia that I don’t know about? She lingers there for moment, and then she eases back into a slouch. After several minutes, she winks at me and I realize she is just fooling around.

My stomach growls loudly. Sherman snickers, and Mom bites her upper lip.

We are greeted
at Ammie and Grandpa’s front door first by Uncle Truck, Aunt Adrienne, and their two kids, Mimi and Truckie, who are visiting from St. Louis. Then there is a huge, happy ruckus as everyone else squeezes into the entry hall: Ammie, Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Aunt Laurie and Uncle Nick, and their six kids, Jane, Ted, Sage, Sasha, and the twins, Tib and Cal.

All the grandchildren except Olivia (who is the oldest and chooses to stay upstairs with the grown-ups) retreat to Ammie and Grandpa’s basement—the girls to play with Ammie’s old dollhouse from her childhood, the boys to Grandpa’s workshop. The dollhouse stands five feet tall, with real electric chandeliers and wallpaper, miniature Oriental rugs, and tiny plates and silverware. When we play with it, it is easy to imagine Ammie’s life in the olden days. From old photographs, and the stories we’ve heard, Highcroft was a magical place where fancy balls and Christmas pageants took place attended by ladies in ball gowns and gentlemen wearing tuxedos and monocles, in rooms that probably looked something like those in the dollhouse.

Across the hall, Sherman and Ted hammer nails into a workbench and saw two-by-fours in half. There is never a speck of sawdust anywhere, on the floor or the benches or the equipment, until the boys spill their hard-earned shavings on the concrete floor.

“There’s two tables in the dining room,” Ted says through gritted teeth, without looking up. Jane and I have strolled in, our interest in the dollhouse exhausted. Ted is pounding a thick nail into the workbench, with a spare one sticking out of the left side of his mouth.

“
You’re
sitting at the
other
table,” he adds, indicating with his eyes that
you
means Sherman and me.

Sherman stops hammering.

“Why?” I ask, puzzled.

“Because you’re Ewings,” Ted says matter-of-factly. The edge of his mouth turns up in a satisfied smile.

“What are you
talking
about, Ted?” Jane says. She looks at me and blushes.

“It was a
joke
,” he says.
“Jeez.”

Jane grabs my elbow and whisks me away. Sherman seems fine, he resumes his hammering, but I am unnerved, even if I don’t show it. I know it was a joke—but it felt like a jolt. Grandpa is Dad’s stepfather, and Uncle Nick and Uncle Truck are Dad’s half brothers. Still, I have always felt fully my grandpa’s granddaughter. That we are Ewings and not Morrisons has never, until now, been pointed out.

We march up to the dining room, where there are, in fact, two tables set. The big table has place cards for all the grown-ups, plus Olivia. The lower table is for the rest of us, and there is no division along last names. Jane rearranges the place cards at our table so that we can sit together. I feel only slightly relieved.

In the living room, a fire crackles and blazes. I survey the room and allow its familiarity to soothe me because I am suddenly feeling like I’d rather not be here. On one wall hangs the gilded portrait of Grandpa as a younger man, clad in a khaki-colored military jacket, complete with medals and badges, sitting erect with his arms folded on his desk, peering discerningly right into my eyes.

You are my Grandpa too, I think.

Yes, I am, he seems to be saying.

Jane and I plop down on one of the sofas by the fire. On the coffee table, we spot the small, familiar photo album, in aged brown leather, with
HIGHCROFT
embossed on it in gold. We nestle together and hold the book between us, poring over the yellowing black-and-white photos encased in crisp cellophane sleeves. Ammie’s maiden name was Heffelfinger, and her grandparents built Highcroft. I used to laugh at the funny-sounding name, and poor Olivia was teased mercilessly for it when grade school classmates discovered it was her middle name. But over the years I’ve heard enough stories, and seen enough pictures, to know that Heffelfinger is a name my family takes pride in. When people say “She’s a Heffelfinger”—and they actually do—even though it’s not my name, I feel connected, anchored.

The first photograph shows the front of Highcroft, buried in several feet of snow. From the size of the trees flanking the brick house, and the Classical entrance, it looks like an important house, and even though it was torn down several years before I was born, the picture fills me with a satisfying pride. Another picture shows the same view in summer. Each window is shaded by an awning, the kind I have seen at country clubs. I count twenty awnings on the front of the house alone, not including the third-floor windows, which are bare. A third picture shows the back of the house from a distance, with a three-story colonnade partially shaded by two tall trees. In the foreground is a sprawling lawn.

I prefer the pictures of the outside of the house to the ones of the inside. The interior pictures remain lifeless, gray, and cluttered. We skip over these to find our favorite picture: the summer gardens, with huge swaths of well-tended flowers, which I visualize as pink and white.

In the buffet line
, Mom and the aunts serve food from chafing dishes set up on the sideboard. Everyone knows to stand behind
his or her assigned place and wait for Grandpa’s nod to be seated. Then, in silence, with bowed heads, we hold hands and listen to Grandpa’s soft, commanding voice: “Bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service. Amen.”

Then he raises his glass. “Here’s to family, to those of us who are here”—Grandpa pauses. Gazing over the room, his eyes fall on each of us (including the Ewings)—“and to those of us who cannot be here.”

In my head, I count those missing: Uncle Sherm, Dad’s brother who is a rancher in Calgary; his wife, Aunt Claire; and their three grown kids. Dad’s sister Aunt Nan, who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with Uncle Dave. They have six kids, three in college, one in boarding school, two still at home. And Dad’s other sister, Aunt Lucia, who lives in New Hampshire and is divorced. She has three, all grown. That makes twelve more cousins, twenty-three grandchildren in all.

I think Grandpa has two more children—and maybe they have children?—from before he married Ammie, but I’ve never met them.

For a commanding officer, Grandpa is quiet by nature. He sits at the head of the table, his posture board-straight, and chews his food deliberately, rarely speaking between mouthfuls. When someone says something funny—if Uncle Truck boasts about being the only person in the world to have gotten kicked out of Dartmouth twice, and accepted
thrice
—Grandpa’s laugh is nearly mute, his face turns crimson, and he holds a napkin to the corner of his eye to wipe away a tear.

“Here he goes!” someone will say.

Grandpa looks down in his lap, so we can see his gleaming bald head, and transfers his napkin to his opposite hand to wipe the corner of his other eye.

Ammie is a natural storyteller. She keeps us on the edges of our seats with her tales of life at Highcroft: the Christmas pageants in which all the kids—including grandchildren and second cousins and the help’s children and grandchildren—acted in the Nativity
play; rites of passage, like learning to drive, and carving one’s initials in the old Ford’s dashboard upon mastery.

Invariably, someone mentions Mr. D, the butler, and then someone else hollers “the pervert!” and then everyone laughs some more.

I don’t know why that’s funny.

Once in a while, but not today, someone tells about the time little Heff (Dad) threw a chair at Grandpa. I have always laughed along with everyone else, thinking this was hilarious, but now I’m not so sure.

On Thanksgiving night
, we are back at home and I am in bed. Dad brings me a glass of water and tucks me in.

“How come our house doesn’t have a name?” I ask.

Dad smiles and pats my knee, a bony knob beneath the covers.

“You know, like Highcroft,” I say, “and Many Pines” (Ammie and Grandpa’s place up north), “and … what’s Hickory Hill again?”

“That’s where I was born,” Dad says, “in Pleasantville, New York.”

“Oh,” I say.

Dad doesn’t offer an answer, but I don’t really give him time to before I’ve moved on to my next question.

“And why do you call Grandpa
Unc
?”

At this, Dad pauses.

“Well …,” he says, “it’s short for Uncle Terry. When I was little, I could only say Unc, so it stuck, and I’ve called him that ever since.”

“But he’s not your uncle,” I say.

“No, he’s not. He’s my stepfather.”

“Oh.”

“You knew that, though, didn’t you,” Dad says, not as a question but as a statement.

“Of course!” I say. I feel embarrassed, somehow, for having asked.

After Dad kisses me good night, Mom comes in and sits on the bed between Dad and me, so that we are all three together. “Good night, sweetheart,” she says. She pushes my hair out of my face and kisses my forehead. Dad puts his arm lovingly on Mom’s shoulder, and they gaze at me like I’m some sort of miracle, which, even at twelve years old, still feels wonderful. I’m glad they are both my real parents, no steps.

Together, we say prayers.

Several of my
friends at school start going to Perkins Cake & Steak for breakfast on Thursday mornings with Bill, a youth leader for Young Life, a Christian organization. I plead with my parents to let me join this group (“All they do is eat breakfast, it’s not like they’re going to convert me or anything”), and when I point out that our church doesn’t have a youth group—no camping trips, not even a choir—Mom and Dad give in.

My first Thursday morning, Bill’s old station wagon pulls up to our house. I see Mimi, Mary, and James among the faces peering through the car windows, ballooning their cheeks with their mouths on the glass. Bill walks up to our front door and rings the bell. He has clean, shoulder-length hair and dresses sort of like a hippie, in a wrinkled shirt and baggy white painter’s pants.

Mom and I answer the door together. She introduces herself as Joanne, and then me, and shakes Bill’s hand.

“Have fun!” she says, and I feel myself cringing as Bill and I walk down the path.

“Is that your sister?” Bill asks.

“That’s my
mom
,” I say, mortified.

“Wow, she’s not bad looking.”

I climb into the backseat, say hi to my friends, and try to erase Bill’s comment from my head.

Every Thursday at Perkins, I order the same thing: French toast with bacon. I love the golden ovals of spongy French bread with the powdered sugar sprinkled on top and the mini-scoop of whipped butter.

“Dear Lord,” Bill says, as we are about to dig in. We follow his lead and bow our heads, smiling self-consciously and checking in with one another out of the corners of our eyes. “Bless this meal, and be a comforting presence for these friends who have gathered in Your Name. Teach them what it means to have a deep personal relationship with You. Amen.”

Even without a text in front of me, I am sufficiently literate in religious matters to know which of Bill’s words should be capitalized. But having a “relationship with Christ”—like He’s a person—is something I’ve never considered. In our church, God has never felt personal. I’ve been taught to think of God as the Father-Mother, but God has always felt inanimate, more like the three-letter word
air
than the three-letter word
Him
.

Bill’s blessing is the only reference to religion at breakfast. After the grace, we dig in. James and I usually sit across from or next to each other, and occasionally make eye contact or smile. Throughout the meal, there is much laughter and the occasional tossing of food before we pool our dollars to pay the check. We get back into Bill’s car for the drive to school. At the first red light, we jump out, chase one another once around the car, and pile back in before the light turns green. Arriving at the school’s front entrance just in time for the first bell, I feel like I am—by dint of sheer luck—part of quite possibly the coolest group at school.