“What is wrong with you?” asked my father in a disgusted way, and I started to cry again because I didn’t know.
He turned angrily and walked out of the room, and my mother hesitated, then followed, though she cast me back a look that in another story might have turned me to salt or caused me to disappear entirely. Instead, in this one, it just left me there with the pink light, a large black moth banging at the screen, the sound of the Naval Reserve officers unit during the supper hour marching down the street, performing their summer exercises with low hums and scuffs and heps, to save our country, our world, our freedom! I threw myself on the bed, weeping. I dreamed a disinformation dream of Cuba.
That August the Republican convention renominated Nixon; he was “winding down the war,” like a kind of path.
Watergate was breaking.
Patty Duke got married.
A storm on the sun briefly remagnetized the earth.
I heard about these only in faint broadcasts from my counselor’s radio during rest hour. I lay in the bunk above Monica Hyde, a fourteen-year-old from North Syracuse. When I couldn’t hear the radio, I talked to her. Her biggest sin, she said, had been tearing the zipper off the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover so she could see what was underneath.
“Oh, I did that,” I said. “You were supposed to do that.”
“No, you weren’t,” she said. And I would contemplate my tanned arms, or the previous night’s vespers held in the cricket-chorused chapel (a cleared area of shore with log benches and Lake Panawauc itself as the pulpit). I passed the time being alternately bored and outraged by boredom, seeking new means of self-forgiveness and penance for my crimes. I fell slightly in love with the camp director’s son, a boy my age named Hayden Filo who had been a thalidomide child and who had only three fingers and six toes. After vespers we would sometimes walk through the woods together and he would talk about God, never Jesus, never the Son! Just God, and what God wanted — in ways that sometimes made God seem as gorgeous and enveloping as the violet dusk in which we roamed, and other times like a spoiled and faraway child vexing all his relations.
Sometimes we stopped, by trees and rocks and forks in the path, and kissed. Tree crickets and katydids sang with the ceaseless squawk of a clothesline pulley, all that endless hanging of laundry in the night. Please! We don’t want to hear about it! We lifted our hands and held each other’s faces. We closed our eyes, then oddly, without warning, opened them again. We stayed up late and watched for the northern lights, which came a lot now because of the storm on the sun. They looked like car headlights flashed across the sky, and sometimes failed to impress us. Other times they seemed as miraculous as the angels and we could feel ourselves under their spell and full of kindness and light, our dark, accidental pasts far away.
I won a sword drill competition. I knew the Bible like my own closet (Leviticus 14:10! Green knit crochet vest!). Somehow it was all the same, all paraphernalia my brain had seized and catalogued in a kind of heartless, automatic way. My brain sought always to make the strange familiar, available, not scary. It built railings, ways to get around, maps and roads. It farmed and planted with a panicked, compulsive, mechanical energy. And so I won the Bible drills.
I came in second in a back-dive contest.
I sang “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” in a solo, in front of everyone, at Sunday service. At the end no one clapped, but you didn’t at a church service. That was one of the things that was too bad about church.
I wrote long letters to Sils, making up grotesque but harmless accounts of the other girls in my tent—“They eat dirt!”—but not telling her about the three-fingered boy I was kissing in the woods. At vespers I actually prayed hard to God and on several occasions believed I felt the Holy Spirit enter me then silently cry out and flee. One day after lunch I made an appointment to see Reverend Filo, the camp director. I sat in his office in the back of the main lodge and regarded him steadily. “I want to be baptized,” I explained. I didn’t know whether he knew about the walks I was taking with his son.
“You haven’t been baptized before?”
“No,” I lied. It was the last lie, the necessary lie, the great lie to end all lies; the Jesus lie, lying for the sins of all the other lies.
Reverend Filo looked at me. I had no idea what my parents had told him. “You weren’t baptized when you were twelve like everyone else?”
“I had mono,” I said. The deputy lie. The good-thief-on-the-cross lie. I had been baptized when it meant nothing to me. Now I needed the public atonement—“At-One-ment,” as they said here at Camp Panawauc over bug juice and guitar-strummed hymns. I needed the ritual and spectacle. I needed to fall back against a religious man’s arms, to be blessed and taken up into the clouds briefly, feel Jesus seize my heart and stay there not shriek and fly off. That hadn’t happened the first time. The first time my head had been full of thoughts of breakfast and about how under my baptismal gown, in front of the entire congregation, I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Afterward, I’d gleefully eaten donuts and hot chocolate with the other baptismal “candidates,” as they were called, while the church ladies dried our hair with towels and a bonnet dryer.
“Well, we should get you baptized, then,” said Reverend Filo, as if he were a doctor and this were a perfunctory, snip-and-cut kind of surgery.
Somehow I didn’t think I’d be the only one who would be baptized that day, but I was. There were no robes. I wore my bathing suit and a blue linen cape tied in a knot at my throat. I stood with Reverend Filo in waist-high water, a few feet from the dock, little plastic buoys along the side, the lake warm and still and brown in the stagnant way of late summer. There were soft tall weeds growing up from the lake bottom, and they would do a charming kind of hula and then wind around your legs in a death grip.
On shore there was only my counselor, Sandy; Monica Hyde; and Hayden Filo, who smiled at me beneficently. Now I was truly taking his religion and could marry him. Perhaps that’s what was crossing his mind. It crossed mine.
“Do you, Benoîte-Marie Carr, accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
These were vows. I summoned forth all the force and promise and devotion I knew I had within me. It formed a large dense mass beneath my ribs. My toes began to cramp and cross. I saw it now: There was only Jesus; everything else was nothing. Everything else was squat. The blue of the sky was endless and beckoning and true. There was Goodness. There was The Way. The mountains across the lake were the apostles, and the trees were witnesses descended from on high. The plastic buoys against the dock were the doves of the Holy Spirit.
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” Reverend Filo said something else, but I didn’t really hear. There were pains and spasms in my feet and legs, and then the Reverend’s arm came round the small of my back and he whispered, “Lean back, my dear.” I thought of my back dives, squinted my eyes and pushed off with my feet. But I pushed too hard, as if I were doing a real dive, and the leap back brought Reverend Filo staggering back with me. I opened my mouth wide for air, but water rushed in instead, and the weeds wound malignantly around my legs, paralyzing me. My arms clutched and thrashed. I had never been a good swimmer — I could dive but I couldn’t swim well; during Swimming at school, with its bathing suits color-coded to everyone’s bust size, I had pretended to have my period or else early in the morning I’d bang my finger with a hammer until it swelled and I could arrive at the nurse’s office, requesting a splint. So, now, half-drowning, and bringing a man of God down with me — his head floundering next to mine in the water — I was incapable of saving myself or anyone. My blue cape billowed out to one side of me, its knotted ties twisting and tightening around my neck. I waited for the Holy Spirit to enter me and reside in my heart in peace, take me forever. I opened my eyes underwater, where things were silent but full of motion, muddy shapes and bubbles. I looked up toward the sky and out for God, but all I saw up through the water was the bright storm on the sun, and then Sils in her tiara calling my name, and then, finally, the large looming figure of Frank Morenton, clutching my rope purse — so funny, with my purse! — and looking down from the clouds, which roiled gassily about his feet and ankles like large fuzzy slippers. He looked as if he were scouting out the place, visualizing a turnstile or two and some rides. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t use a turnstile! There wasn’t anything that couldn’t benefit and prosper from Mr. Amusement! Mr. Morenton, Mr. Morenton, I said underwater. I’m very sorry, Mr. Morenton. I was near a great and peaceful death. I felt my soul leave my body yet still retain the skills of the body, so that I could actually see myself leave, waving, floating off like a balloon.