Yanczer was a small, round-faced girl who tended to talk over her shoulder, leaning away from you, as if you’d temporarily changed her mind about leaving. She had her shoulder to the wall now. “I’m sorry, too,” she said, looking at us sideways. “Although, at the same time I feel, like, what’s the big deal?”
“We’re a community here, that’s the big deal,” Mutton said. “We’re allowed to do neat stuff because parents trust us. When people break the rules and undermine that trust, it hurts everyone in the community. It’s possible that this could be the end of the group. This weekend.”
The thieves were passing a smile back and forth.
“What are you two smiling at?” Mutton barked. “You think this is funny?”
“No,” the fair one said, tossing his nearly white locks. “But this does seem a little extreme.”
“Nobody’s making you stay in this room. You can walk out the door any time you want. In fact, why don’t you just leave? Both of you. You’ve been smirking the whole weekend. I’m sick of it.”
The thieves exchanged corroborating looks and headed for the door, followed by the snide girl. This left Hellman, Yanczer, and Magner. The question was whether to banish them, too.
“If this is the way you treat the group,” Mutton said, “if this is the kind of trust level here, why should we want to see you next week? We need to hear why you think you should still be allowed to be part of this group.”
Hellman looked around at us, wide-eyed, beseeching. She said we couldn’t banish her. She loved Fellowship! We’d practically saved her life! She cared about the group more than anything.
A pixie in faded coveralls countered, “If you care about the group, then why’d you bring these freakheads into it and get us all in trouble?”
“I wanted them to know what Fellowship was like,” Hellman said, wringing her hands. “I thought we’d be good for them! I’m sorry!”
“Look, you can’t control what your friends do,” Mutton said. “You’re only responsible for you.”
“But I fucked up, too!” Hellman wailed.
“Right, and you’re taking responsibility for it.”
“But she fucked up!” the pixie in coveralls pointed out. “How is she ‘taking responsibility’ for it?”
“By standing up here and facing you guys,” Mutton answered. “That is a very hard thing to do. That takes guts. No matter what you all decide to do, I want you to think about the guts these guys are showing, just by staying in this room with us.”
There ensued an hour-long excruciation in which, one by one, we addressed the three miscreants and told them how we felt. Girls rubbed ashes into denim and fidgeted with their Winston hard packs. Kids broke out in sobs at the thought of the group’s being disbanded. Outside, crunching around on gravel, were the parents who’d driven down to give us rides home, but it was Fellowship procedure to confront crises without delay, and so we kept sitting there. Hellman and Yanczer and Magner alternately apologized and lashed out at us: What about forgiveness? Hadn’t we ever broken rules ourselves?
I found the whole scene confusing. Hellman’s confession had stamped her, in my mind, as a scary outcast stoner, the kind of marginal person I was afraid of and disdained at school, and yet she was acting as if she’d die if she couldn’t come to Fellowship. I liked the group, too, or at least I had until this morning; but I certainly couldn’t see myself dying without it. Hellman seemed to be having a more central and authentic Fellowship experience than the rules-abiding members she’d betrayed. Here was Mutton talking about how brave she was! When my turn came to speak, I said I was afraid my parents wouldn’t let me go to Fellowship anymore, because they were so anti-drug, but I didn’t think that anybody should be suspended.
It was past noon when we emerged from the community center, blinking in the strong light. The banished thieves were down by the picnic tables, tossing a Nerf football and laughing. We had decided to give Hellman and Yanczer and Magner a second chance, but the really important thing, Mutton said, was to go straight home and tell our parents what had happened. Each one of us had to take full responsibility for the group.
This was probably hardest for Hellman, who loved Fellowship in proportion to her father’s unkindness to her at home, and for Yanczer. When Yanczer’s mother was given the news, she threatened to call the police unless Yanczer went to her junior-high principal and narked out the friend who supplied her with drugs; this friend was Magner. It was a week of gruesome scenes, and yet somehow all three kids dragged themselves to Fellowship the following Sunday.
Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days — spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive — I was probably most afraid of my parents. My father had almost never spanked me, but his anger had been Jehovan when he did. My mother possessed claws with which, when I was three or four years old and neighbor kids had filled my hair with Vaseline to achieve a kind of Baby Greaser effect, she’d repeatedly attacked my scalp between dousings of scalding-hot water. Her opinions were even sharper than her claws. You just didn’t want to mess with her. I never would have dared, for example, to take advantage of her absence from the country and break her rules and wear jeans to school, because what if she found out?
Had I been able to talk to my parents right away, the retreat’s momentum might have carried me. But they were still in Europe, and I daily became more convinced that they would forbid me to go to Fellowship — not only this, but they would yell at me, and not only this, but they would force me to hate the group — until I landed in a state of full-bore dread, as if I were the one who’d broken the rules. Before long, I was more afraid of confessing to the group’s collective crime than I’d ever been of anything.
In Paris, my mother had her hair done at Elizabeth Arden and chatted with the widow of Pie Traynor, the Hall of Fame third baseman. In Madrid, she ate suckling pig at Casa Botín among crowds of Americans whose ugliness depressed her, but then she ran into the married couple who owned the hardware store in Webster Groves and who were also on vacation, and she felt better. The twenty-eighth of October she spent with my father in a first-class train compartment, traveling to Lisbon, and noted in her travel diary: Nice 29th anniversary — being together all day. In Lisbon, she received an airmail letter in which I didn’t say a word about the Fellowship retreat.
My brother Bob and I were waiting at the airport in St. Louis on Halloween. Coming off the plane, my parents looked amazingly fit and cosmopolitan and lovable. I found myself smiling uncontrollably. This was supposed to have been the evening for my confession, but it seemed potentially awkward to involve Bob in it, and not until he’d returned to his apartment in the city did I understand how much harder it would be to face my parents without him. Since Bob usually came to dinner on Sunday nights, and since Sunday was only four days away, I decided to delay my disclosure until he came back. Hadn’t I already delayed two weeks?
On Sunday morning, my mother mentioned that Bob had other plans and wasn’t coming to dinner.
I considered never saying anything at all. But I didn’t see how I could go back and face the group. The anguish in Shannondale had had the mysterious effect of making me feel more intimately committed to Fellowship, rather than less, as if we were all now bound together by shame, the way strangers who’d slept together might wake up feeling compassion for each other’s embarrassment and fall in love on that basis. To my surprise, I found that I, too, like Hellman, loved the group.