| I
My younger brother was a liar.
I remember being in the fourth grade, on recess in the schoolyard, and a gang of Ryan's friends rushing up to me. They jostled one another, all talking at once, out of breathe with their urgency, shouting, "Hey! You have a swimming pool? A built-in swimming pool?"
"A pool? No—"
"Your father really has a million dollars?"
I hesitated, unbalanced by the odd questions. "No. My dad—"
"And a submarine?"
"No!"
"Is your whole family really going to Bermuda this Christmas?"
"No! Who—"
"Ryan said you did."
"Yeah. Ryan said you did."
I didn't know the word for my hot emotion was humiliation. I walked away from the younger kids, pretending nothing they had said meant anything to me. But I was looking for Ryan. I finally cornered him near the trees at the edge of the playground as everyone else was being herded back into the school.
Ryan laughed and said he hadn't told anyone anything about swimming pools, submarines or family vacations in Bermuda. He tried to run past me, to join the kids going back into the school.
I tripped him and pushed him down in the dirt.
"Stop lying." I was eleven and my voice was strange with my anger.
"All right, all right!" Ryan said, standing and brushing the dust from his shirt.
I was walking away when he asked, "What's the big deal?"
II
That summer, the day after our family returned from a grueling, quarrelsome car-camping vacation in Pennsylvania, Ryan was up early and out of the house, making his rounds, playing with his many friends in the neighborhood.
That afternoon, as I did my newspaper route, every grownup and every kid I came across asked me, "How was Bermuda?"
I didn't answer. I carried the canvas shoulder bag, heavy with newspapers, and threw each folded newspaper into each screen door as hard as I could.
III
I was twenty-seven and living in Manhattan when Ryan invited me to his wedding. I rented a car, and with my new girlfriend Kate, drove to the small Connecticut town my brother lived in. We drove straight into a snow storm.
"Ryan's latest snow job," I muttered.
"What?"
I smiled, still not used to being with someone who cared to know what I said, or thought. "Nothing, Kate. Nothing."
We parked on the hushed, snow covered main street, across from a four story brick building that had been painted blue and gold. "That's Ryan's church," I said.
Kate, a New Yorker who considered crossing the Hudson or East River to be camping out, leaned over me to get a better view of the two-story high sign attached to the building's facade. The sign blazed a red neon message through the white veil of falling snow: Jesus Saves! 24 Hours!
"That sign is wild," Kate said. "There's even a telephone number to call!" She was delighted. She asked, "Do you think Jesus answers his own phone."
On the drive, I had told Kate how, a year ago, when twenty-five, Ryan had joined this small church that proclaimed itself "evangelical" and denied any ties to any formal religion or any other church. Within months, Ryan had moved to this town to be close to the church. Now he was about to marry the seventeen year-old daughter of another church member.
"It looks like a theater," Kate said.
"It was," I said. "A burlesque theater."
Her laughter made me smile, made me think there was no good reason to carry the weight I felt. It was all ridiculous, maybe even delightful.
"Really. It had been empty for ten years when the church bought it and fixed it up. Wait till you see the inside. The stage is still there. You can almost see the ghosts of huge-breasted women, dancing, bumping, grinding, making the twirls on their pasties spin in opposite directions, globs of mascara—"
"False eyelashes," Kate interrupted. "False eyelashes. Definitely they would have worn false eyelashes."
"You're right. Foot long false eyelashes and fishnet stockings—"
"With holes in them."
I could smell Kate's scent in the warm car, and almost stopped her when she rolled down her window and the cold flowed in, bringing the wet smell and quiet of the falling snow into the car.
Kate asked, "Why did he join?"
"He was afraid," I said, because I had asked and answered that question a long ago.
"Afraid of what?"
"Dying."
I told Kate how Ryan had joined the church. He was working a high-paying job inspecting jet engines at a plant not far from this backwoods town. He worked long hours and he hated it. He was twenty-five, forty pounds overweight, and spending his money on a decade of hard drinking and recreational drug use he showed no sign of out-growing. A co-worker, a man named Carlos who had an implacable smile, devoted months to patiently separating Ryan from his hard-drinking, carousing buddies. He coaxed Ryan into the church.
Kate said, "Tell me about when you were inside the church."
I was glad for the distraction. I described the loud organ music, the enthusiastic, off-key singing, and the continual shouts of, "Praise the Lord!" I told her of having to shake hands with every beaming man and woman and child who could lean over their pew far enough to grab my hand. The climax of the celebration, as they called it, was when every member of the several hundred strong congregation wailed like Irish keening women and thrust their palms into the air in anguished ecstasy.
"Their palms?" Kate's voice was soft with concentration.
"You know, the crucifixion. The nails, the wounds, in Jesus' hands."
IV
It snowed all the next morning and into the afternoon.
The wedding was performed on the old burlesque theatre's stage.
The preacher, jowly, in a sport coat without a tie, held an open bible, but ad-libbed the entire ceremony. He had a hard southern accent, that had something in common with the hard New England accents of so many people I had grown up with. The preacher said Ryan was sinful. He said that before Ryan had joined the church, he was headed to an early, and bad, end. He chided Ryan for a sometimes wavering faith, which was news to me. Then he laughed at my brother's "appetite" and called him fat.
I muttered, "Asshole!"
Kate punched my ribs, and bit into my shoulder to stifle her laughter.
Later, on the drive home, we both swore we had heard echoes of my curse from around us in the pews.
V
The reception was held in a restaurant where the female employees were costumed in Colonial-style dresses and bonnets, the male employees in black Pilgrim suits and hats, and no alcohol was permitted.
This was the first opportunity the wedding guests from the two halves of Ryan's life— Before the Church and After the Church— had to mingle. They didn't.
This delighted Kate. "A hundred and fifty people, all 'suffering' one another's presence!"
"I'm suffering for a drink," I said.
At that moment, my father approached. "Have you had a turn with the Church Key?"
"Church key?"
"The Church Key," he said, placing a bottle opener into my hand. My father, a stern, unquestioning Irish-Catholic, directed Kate and me, "Just stroll past the rest rooms and out the door. You'll find the altar there."
Kate and I went down a dim hall of fake oak panelling. There were dark lithographs in plastic frames showing American Colonists drudging behind massive oxen, or shooting from behind trees at phalanxes of terrified Redcoats.
We went through a door that had been left ajar, and stood outside on a small concrete step. Nestled in the snow beside the step were dozens of bottles of beer.
We used the "church key" to open two bottles.
"It's beautiful out here," Kate said. "What a strange and beautiful planet."
The beer was sharp and bitter and so cold it made my teeth ache. We watched the heavy falling snow. "I don't think it's snowed this much since I was a kid," I said. "Not since I was a kid."
VI
We drove back to Manhattan late that night.
Kate enthusiastically reviewed the day's events and cast of characters.
She struggled to describe Ryan's new wife, a seventeen year old girl who never smiled. "She's a zero." Kate pointed to her own head and quoted Dorothy Parker, "There's no there, there."
She rubbed my shoulder. "Wasn't the preacher a riot?"
"The star of the show."
"That good 'ol boy southern accent," she said. "The gut hanging over his unbelted polyester pants. His ridiculous malapropisms and bogus Old Testament grammar."
I realized that Kate was trying to make me laugh. She had set herself that task. In the past, it would have been disconcerting to be the object of someone's generosity, compassion. I was still getting used to it. And I would forever be grateful.
Later, Kate slept with her head resting on my shoulder. As I drove, a silent movie began playing in the darkness just beyond the reach of the headlights.
In that movie, I saw myself, six years old, alone, standing on top of the big hill in our backyard.
It was snowing hard, and the heavy dark of night pressed down. At the base of the hill, the windows of the house were yellow squares, the deep snow on the ground was dark blue.
In vivid memory I saw Ryan, five years old, come running out of the house. I heard the storm door bang shut behind him.
He called to me. I didn't answer. I watched him labor up the hill, using his hands to plow through the deep snow. I could hear him breathing hard, gasping to call my name and shovel aside the snow to reach me.
When he was almost to the top, I ran. I ran down the hill, past Ryan, and threw myself into the snow and tumbled forever in a cold, dark-white world.
At the base of the hill I was on my back, coughing, gasping, too dizzy to stand, staring up into the black sky, blinking from the snow falling into my face, like soft shards of exploded stars.
I started yelling someting. I yelled so hard that my stomach hurt for air.
As I drove, the snow slanting across the car's headlights, Kate's head resting on my shoulder, I heard again my six year-old voice, heard again each hard, separate word I had yelled into the black sky of falling snow.
"I don't want to die!"
Gran Soren is a writer. He lives in San Diego. |
