A Girl Named Zippy (15 page)

SLUMBER PARTY

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.     —A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

I
didn’t believe in God, had not ever, as far as I could remember, believed in God, and yet I was reluctant to formulate the thought too clearly, not to mention speak it aloud, for fear that poor God would hear it and get His feelings hurt.

I believed that the baby Jesus had gotten born, and that was all lovely. Christmas was my favorite time of the year, in part because of the excellent speech, “Fear not: I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .” and because of the song “The Little Drummer Boy.” Anything that involved such persistent percussion was undoubtedly both religious and true.

After he ceased to be a baby Jesus held little interest for me, until he reached the age where he sat for the portrait that hung above the swinging doors in the vestibule of the Mooreland Friends Church. In the painting, which glowed from a fluorescent light bulb hung beneath it, the Big Jesus looks pensive and honey-eyed. His shoulder-length, light-brown hair is as clean and shiny as corn silk, and he has a beautiful tan. He is not scorched like a farmer, but bronzed, like a lifeguard. He is way better looking than either Glen Campbell or Engelbert Humperdinck.

I wanted him to be my boyfriend. My feelings about Jesus didn’t alarm me at all, because it appeared that everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn’t be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn’t afraid of blind people. I didn’t buy the bit about his terrible death and resurrection for a minute. I knew, beyond any room for doubt, that nothing in this world is both alive and dead. And this was the thing I most wanted to say in church: if you want him to be alive, you’ve got to stop hanging him on that cross. But it appeared that the cross was what the people of Mooreland valued above all else—more than his life, more than the sweet way he carried lambs on his shoulders in the pictures on the fans furnished by Main & Frame Funeral Homes—the cross, and the way he got sucked up into heaven to be with the Father who killed him. It was such an objectionable story that I decided to skip it. I decided that Jesus was alive, just as people claimed, and that he lived in the trees around my house. He had picked me out personally, and was following me around, watching my every move. Sometimes I lay out in the backyard with my blue tape recorder, just holding the microphone up to the sky. I figured if Jesus was ever going to break his long silence, it would be on a warm, breezy day in Mooreland, with his best girl waiting patiently in the grass. The tapes I made were very peculiar and very boring. The only voice heard is that of my dad, telling me he’s waiting inside with the Campho-Phenique and the Chig-a-Rid. No one ever tried to discourage me; it is written in our very bones, as a people, that true religion requires sacrifice.

THE ONLY TIME
my father entered the Mooreland Friends Church (aside from my sister’s wedding) is, fortunately, documented by a photograph. Since Quakers don’t believe in sacraments, including baptism, Quaker children, when they’re old enough to consent, are instead “dedicated” to the church and the religious life. I was dedicated when I was six years old; I don’t remember anyone asking for my permission. Dad dutifully put on his brown suit, which he highlighted sportingly with a pink shirt, and accompanied us to the services. I wore my little yellow dress, and my mom was traditionally Quaker in dark gray. In the photograph we are standing in front of the altar, my mom and I looking fairly pleased, my dad looking defiant. I stand between my two parents, holding the hand of each. After the ceremony was over, our pastor, Eddie, asked if I knew what had just happened, and I said, “Sure. Mommy and Daddy and me just got married to God.”

My mom belonged to a prayer cell that met after Wednesday evening services, and often I would stay and listen to them rather than walk home in the dark by myself. It seemed that the women mostly prayed about their husbands and children, which got them all worked up into a state. I’ve never seen so much crying as went on in my church; some people cried
every time
they walked through the door. My own mother prayed about almost nothing but my dad. Week after week, year after year, for twenty-seven years she prayed that God would touch his heart and cause him to become a hardworking, nondrinking, churchgoing kind of man.

And every week, when we got home, we would find Dad sitting stone-faced in his chair, watching television with his arms crossed over his chest, smoking cigarettes. It was a romantic way to sit and smoke, I thought. As soon as my mom left the room Dad would ask, “Was my name mentioned?” Not looking at me, but still staring straight ahead.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, next week you go in there and tell them that they can pray for me till the cows come home, but I’m a stubborn old cuss. They’re never going to win.”

And I would say okay, but both of us knew that I’d swallow my own tongue before I’d make an announcement to a group of adults at church. Besides, it never crossed my mind that my mom’s prayers would be answered. I knew my dad was safe.

MOM USED TO SAY
that my dad was a mountain man, which was obviously just a figure of speech, since most of Indiana is flat as a pancake. Her point was that Dad was a wild man, which was certainly true. One year at Thanksgiving we went camping, and in order to cook the turkey over the campfire my dad invented what he called a “turkey tent,” a device none of us could replicate, which cooked the turkey perfectly and in record time. I know it will someday show up in an L. L. Bean catalog, patented by someone not even related to me.

He was a great hunter, fisherman, and keeper of bees. He would eat even the most obviously offensive foods, such as possum and fried mush, and was never careless with fire or guns. And I always believed that if he were dropped into a wilderness with just the barest essentials, he would emerge victorious, if for no other reason than he was so blindingly well organized that nature would never stand a chance.

Our little camper was always packed with the greatest care, and nothing was left to chance. All medical, laundry, and culinary emergencies were covered. We had enough decks of cards that we could have easily added sixteen unexpected people on Euchre night, and when one of the lightbulbs blew out in the string of fish-lights we hung around the camper, he had an extra, and usually in the right color. If we took a detour he had a map of that town, too. Our dogs never misbehaved, our tires never went flat, and if the people camping next to us needed five gallons of gas, he would just happen to have it. When he was at the wheel, everyone else could sleep, because he never would. In short, he was what it meant to be a father and a man in 1971. Up against his power I could see none of his failings.

ONE EVENING AS WE SAT
on the porch swing, generally not talking, just swinging, I asked him.

“Daddy, why ain’t you a Christian?”

He gave me the one eyebrow, but without looking at me. “Who says I’m not?”

“Everybody.”

“Yeah, well, they’re right.”

We went on swinging. Sometimes conversations with him only went so far.

THE NEXT MORNING
he woke me up pretty early, which made me think we were going fishing, but instead he announced that we were going to his church. Now I could see that this was nothing but a trick, because my dad wouldn’t belong to any church that would have him, and it wasn’t even Sunday.

“Do I have to wear a dress?” I asked, already miserable.

“Nope. Just pull on your jeans.”

When I got out to the truck he was sitting there waiting for me, drinking coffee out of his thermos cup. Dad could sit in the truck so still, with his arm out the window, as if he were already going someplace. I climbed in and up on the box he made for his kids so we could sit as tall as he did. He thought it wasn’t right that we couldn’t see out the front windshield just because we were small. Danny had used it, then Melinda, but now it was completely mine. The box was wooden, but covered with a pad and then a brown-and-white-checkered cloth. I rode in the middle of the seat, right next to him, which meant I had to all the time move my feet so he could shift gears. There was no such thing as a seat belt in our family.

We drove out of Mooreland and down the highway toward New Castle, and then past New Castle toward the little town of Dunreith. We didn’t get as far as Dunreith, though, before he turned off the highway into a campground called Lake of the Woods. It wasn’t a campground we ever stayed in; it was too close to home and too close to the highway, but he drove through it like he knew it, and some of the permanent residents, the people who lived in their little trailers, waved at him in a familiar way.

We wound around all the campsites, and then back a narrow, rutted road that went right into the woods. I kept looking at him, waiting for an explanation, but he was silent. When the road ended, we got out of the truck and followed a well-worn trail. It wasn’t long before we had reached a large, round clearing. The perimeter was marked by big logs set in the ground, perfect for sitting. And at the front of the clearing, or what appeared to be the front by the way the eye was drawn to it, was a cross, made from huge, gnarled trees.

Dad sat down on one of the logs, and I sat down next to him.

“This is my church,” he said, waving vaguely at the woods surrounding us.

“Daddy, this is a campground.”

“So?”

“So it ain’t a proper church. This is just where people come when they’re away from home. What kind of services do they hold?”

“I don’t know. I never come when there are other people here.”

“Then that settles it. To have a church you’ve got to have other people; a preacher; an altar, and some fans for waving when it gets hot.”

“Is that all?”

“No. And some hankies. You know Hazel Deckerd? She can fold up a hankie with her thumb inside so it looks like the swaddling Jesus.”

He thought for a moment about how completely I knew a real church. “What does the Bible say about two or three gathered together?” he asked, not like in Sunday school, where everything was a quiz, but like maybe he just forgot.

“‘Where two or three are gathered together, there I am also.’”

Dad could sometimes get a smarty-pants look on his face, which I wouldn’t have ever been allowed to do myself. It was a look that said that people were just regularly walking into his traps.

“Does it say two or three what?” he asked, looking me in the eye.

I thought. Of course it meant people, but that’s not what it said. I shook my head.

“Are there two or three of something out here?” he asked, gesturing around us.

I nodded. “There are two or three trees, and two or three bugs, and two or three flowers. And us, of course.”

“Then this is where God is.”

I leaned against his arm. He was wrong about the Bible, and I knew it as well as I knew all the books of the New Testament, in order. Christians were flat-out strict about how everything got read, and nothing was to be scrumbled around unless it was by a preacher. But it was a nice place. It was peaceful. I was glad that Dad had a church of his own somewhere. His cigarette smoke hung blue in the air all around us.

WHEN MELINDA WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL
she was allowed to have a slumber party; she invited a Jamey, two Debbies, and a Cindy. It was unusual to have friends spend the night in our house. For one thing, my dad couldn’t abide a lot of noise, and also our house was just a disgrace, which was a thing I wasn’t aware of until the first time I had someone over for the night. It was Rose’s younger sister, Maggie. We’d known each other since Maggie was in diapers. She walked into the kitchen and saw a pan of biscuits. She asked me if she could eat one.

“Oh. You’d better not.” I looked at them hard, but could not honestly remember how long they’d been sitting there. I thought since maybe Christmas, which had been three months before.

She picked one up and banged it down on the pan. These were obviously excellent weapons, so she threw it at me. We threw those biscuits at each other all over the house. Maggie was such a good sport.

Before the slumber party, my sister cleaned up the house as best she could, making it relatively presentable. I was to stay out of her way and not try to insinuate myself into the party, a thing I often did when her friends came to visit. My best trick was to put on one of Melinda’s albums and sing along with every word of a complicated song, like “Along Comes Mary,” by the Association. My other favorites were “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You,” by the Bee Gees, and “Sounds of Silence,” by Simon and Garfunkel. I was downright fond of pop music.

“Wow! Do you see what your little sister is doing? She knows the Canticle part of ‘Scarborough Fair’!”

“Yes, I see,” my sister would say through clenched teeth, trying desperately to heave stink-eye my way.