the habit of being

I always strain for an opening line. My favorite: “In an old house in Paris, covered with vines, lived twelve little girls, in two straight lines.” Madeline doll, wherever she hides, is stained with cat piss now, and I don’t even know where the books went, but I still adore little French girls in uniforms, nuns, scars, and foreign words thrown into stories for effect.

She was the bravest and the smallest of all, with red hair and no appendix. The smallest one is always best in children’s tales, the smallest is always hurt but always perseveres, is not afraid, even of tigers and circuses. We are taught early on to take up as little space as possible, as it will make our achievements all the more incredible. We are taught to feel unworthy of the volume of air we breathe. I too have compassion for stars, for their mass and their heat, and envy them still, for I’ll never get the chance to reduce to a point of almost nothing.

When playing house, it was always desirable to be the youngest child, the most needy, therefore the most loved by whichever girl was taking on the role of Mother. We’d stand in the wading pool at day-care and fight for the honor of being the baby. It was disgraceful to be the oldest (huge), but even that was no horror compared to being forced into the middle role. I fear mediocrity to this day, would rather be fully terrible than just alright. As a child, I never seemed able to shout “smallest!” quickly enough at the start, and was thrust into a state of awkward medium even in games of pretend. And oh, those other girls were awful, they stole my Barbie clothes.

My mother would assure me, on dropping me off at Miss Diane’s at 6 AM each morning (She worked the early shift at Willingway Hospital, so we could afford pita pockets and the Franklin’s spaghetti special on Tuesdays, before we had a man to take care of us, before we had TV, before I knew what a Happy Meal was.), that she would always come back. I had my blanket with me always, and it smelled like home (It stank, she told me, but I couldn’t stand for anyone I wash it, it was my blanket, it reminded me of my mother, it made me safe.), so I believed her. It was really rather nice, despite never getting to be the baby, for I considered the head bitch (a beauty queen, daughter of the woman who ran the day-care) my best friend. We’d bonded on the first day I came, sharing the sofa as our bed, and poking our toes through the knit throw. By the time I was ten, I thought I was quite in love with her, with her straight blonde hair and her more-girly figure, more pubic hair and perkier little breasts, her make-up, fake Cindy Crawford mole, all her trophies. Little Miss Everything. She graduated last year. We hadn’t spoken for six years.

Sunday school was worse than day-care, to be sure. I can only remember a brief period in my life when my mother went to church, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a month, maybe it was a year, but I sat staring through the window of the children’s room at First Methodist Church, waiting for her to walk out of the chapel, with its huge stained glass windows and constant up and down mechanical congregation. I could be persuaded to play with no one, I looked through that window constantly, throughout the entire service, watching the door, waiting for her to come back. Maybe it was a day, maybe it was a week.

Now my younger brother, Wayne, after spending a few days at grandmother’s, asks why we don’t go to church. My mother and I assure him he wouldn’t like it, you have to get up early and get dressed up, and it is like school without any other kids. (I went to Vacation Bible School once when I was a kid, I came home thinking I was going to Hell, a God’s Eye in one hand and a bookmark for my Precious Moments Bible in the other. I went to Jennifer’s church once, and I cried all the way home. It wasn’t just because she was so beautiful singing in the choir.) Wayne says you have to go to church so you can “learn about Jesus and stuff.” Mom tells him she and I know a little about Jesus, and we’ll tell him. He’s already heard the Christmas story, so we tell him other things, how Jesus could perform miracles, heal people, and “make five fish into a gazillion.” I tell him how Jesus got pissed at the money lenders and knocked over tables, and once he made this “really cool speech” called the Sermon on the Mount, and that was the best part. Told him what a disciple was, and how a Bad Woman washed Jesus’ feet. He was betrayed, they put a crown of thorns on his head and killed him. “I know this part!” Wayne pipes up. Mom says she can’t remember what the “exact charge” was, and I say it was because he said he was the son of God.

Mom launches straight into how “some people believe all those things in the Bible really happened, word for word, Jesus really could make all those fish appear, and he really could make blind people see again, and his body really floated up to heaven after he died. There are a lot of people who believe that around here, and those people are called Fundamentalists, but there are lots of different kinds of Christians, and some of them believe that the stories themselves are not the important thing, but the morals they illustrate. In other religions, many of the same stories are used, only with different characters playing the roles.” On about how when things get passed down over time they get modified, and how people need drama to illustrate a point, and sometimes it is just errors in translation, a virgin or a young lady, and Wayne is staring out the window, watching the trees go by.

I read the Gospels twice, thinking of Jennifer singing in the choir, and I thought it was beautiful, heathen that I am. I think it is all so pretty, and that is the problem with me. I could cry for the beauty of it all, thinking of how she read Ecclesiastes to me, and that is so much more important to me than anything else, than any of the words on the page. (For clarity, as needed, I speak here of faith, as a power stronger than religion itself, something more profound, when it is honest, educated, and not just something blindly accepted as true. That concept held me in awe, true belief in something that cannot be proven. If it exists, it is far more miraculous than any fish-trick. Her singing, her reading, I found more touching than anything she was singing or reading about.) But I was never a Christian, not even for a little while, not even when I was little, and when all those church ladies with their huge cross necklaces talk of those dregs of the world, led astray by Satan, who have never seen the light and never been saved, those poor souls they pretend to have sympathy for, the ones destined for eternal hellfire, that’s me they’re talking about. Nine out of ten of my classmates at school think I am going to hell. My grandparents all think I am going to hell, whether they know it or not. Even Jennifer, when she was reading me Eccl. and introducing me to her friends from church.. I couldn’t keep that thought out of my head. It’s probably worse in the South.

I guess I’ve never been able to justify that, thought I don’t blame poor Jesus for the actions of his followers; after all, that Sermon on the Mount was one kickass speech. And there must be bad Buddhists just as there are bad Christians, but I didn’t grow up being condemned by them, and there isn’t that layer of trash obscuring the message.

I think about meiosis, and it is a religious experience. Really.. that is not my attempt at wit.