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How, if my parents were dead, could there still be some part of me that felt relief at not being found out?
Grandma stooped over with a yellow rag, sprinkling out the cleanser, that chemical-mint smell puffing around us, her son dead and her daughter-in-law dead and her only grandchild a now-orphaned shoplifter, a girl who kissed girls, and she didn’t even know, and now she was cleaning up my vomit, feeling even worse because of me: That’s what made me cry.
But all those times, no matter what the occasion, it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony, like I was playing at a relationship with God, just like any little kid playing house or grocery store or anything else, but not like it was real.
I knew that this is where the faith part was supposed to come in, and that faith, real faith, that’s what was supposed to keep the whole thing from just being make-believe. But I didn’t have any of that faith, and I didn’t know where to get it, how to get it, or even if I wanted it right then.
I felt like it could be that God had made this happen, had killed my parents, because I was living my life so wrong that I had to be punished, that I had to be made to understand how I must change, and...
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But I also thought, at the exact same time I was thinking the other stuff, that maybe what all this meant was that there was no God, but instead only...
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each of us, predetermined—and that maybe there was some lesson in my mom drowning at Quake Lake thirty years later. But it wasn’t a lesson from God; it was something else, something more like putting tog...
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But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.
I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to. I’d certainly never considered that someday my feelings might grant me access to a community of like-minded women. If anything, weekly services at Gates of Praise had assured me of exactly the opposite.
How could I pretend to be a victim when I was so willing to sin?
I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.
It was one of those August afternoons that Montana does just right, with heavy gray thunderheads crowding out the movie-blue sky and the feeling of a guaranteed downpour just beginning to change the touch of the air, the color of the sunlight.
I’d keep my head down, my thoughts lost to whatever song was on, me somehow both in a high school in Miles City and also in some other world entirely.
I was doing my little stand-up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they’d like me quickly and wouldn’t try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron the orphan.
Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don’t get too close; I’m just jokes without substance.
“The good thing about it happening tonight is that it’s Bucking Horse,” Coley said, taking my arm and walking us out of there. “We can find you a cowboy in no time. Or two cowboys. Twelve cowboys.” And I wanted so much to say “Or how about a cowgirl?” Just say it, right then, in the moment, put it out there and let it stay and make Coley deal with it. But of course I didn’t. No way.
I could feel something happening between us, something even beyond my buzz from the liquor, something that had started with the wrestling on the couch, before that, too, if I was to be honest. I closed my eyes and willed it just to finally happen.
“So you kissed her, she rocked your world, leave it be,” Lindsey told me when I phone-spilled most of the details, including my stuck-boot fall. “It’s like one of many, many such kisses in your future, but for her it’s the thing she’ll obsess over after she gets the two point five kids and the mortgage. She’ll ask herself as she’s trying to sleep at night: Why didn’t I make it with that chick when I had the chance?”
Lindsey once tried to explain to me this primordial connection, she said, that all lesbians have with vampire narratives; something to do with the gothic novella Carmilla and the sexual and psychological impotence of men when facing the dark power of lesbian seduction.
I could have spent hours just tracing my lips over her perfect skin,
Instead, I stayed where I was, rested my head on her stomach: it felt and sounded like her heart had somehow slid down into it, each beat pulsing loud and superfast in my ear.
Maybe it was feeling like we all had shared history, somehow. That understanding somebody else’s path to Promise would help me make sense of my own. What I know is that all of us, all of us, collected each other’s pasts and shared them, like trading Garbage Pail Kids cards—each one wackier and stranger and more unlikely than the next.
Who can truly claim ownership of a soul? Of a life? Shit like that.
“There’s no such thing as homosexuality,” she said. “Homosexuality is a myth perpetuated by the so-called gay rights movement.” She spaced out each word of her next sentence. “There is no gay identity; it does not exist. Instead, there is only the same struggle with sinful desires and behaviors that we, as God’s children, each must contend with.”
Really? Well, if homosexuality is just like the sin of murder, then who dies, exactly, when homosexuals get together to sin?
Funny—my sin seems pretty fucking special considering that you’ve built an entire treatment facility to deal with it. What I said out loud, though, was “I don’t think of myself as a homosexual. I don’t think of myself as anything other than me.”
Absent father.
embrace my worth as a feminine woman and, in doing so, open myself up for Godly, heterosexual relationships.
she instantly made me feel like I was sinning right then, pretty much just by being alive, by breathing, like my presence was the embodiment of sin and it was her job to rid me of it.
At Word of Life I felt like a big, shiny, obvious goldfish, a goldfish well known to have homosexual tendencies, so basically a big, gay goldfish in a tank with eighteen other such goldfish, wheeled in and parked in a pew for two hours, much to the delight of the crowd.
I just nodded my head in the places where it seemed like I should.
And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.’”
something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held conviction or opinion.
True or real: Those were definite words; opinion and conviction just weren’t—opinions wavered and changed and fluctuated with the person, the situation. And most troubling of all was the word accepts. Something one accepts. I was much better at excepting everything than accepting anything, at least anything for certain, for definite. That much I knew. That much I believed.
But I didn’t, I don’t know, I didn’t long for it, either. Longing is sort of a gross word. So is ache. Or yearn. They’re all kind of gross. But that’s how I had felt about touching, kissing, Coley. It’s not how I felt about Adam. And I know it’s not how he felt about me.
But I guess that says something, maybe more than something, about what home now meant to me.
The longer I stayed at Promise, the more all the stuff they were throwing at me, at us, started to stick, just like to those sticky hands, in little bits, at first, random pieces, no big deal.
“Don’t just give me an automatic dick pass.” He bent and kissed her cheek and said, “I don’t get to be a douche just because my roommate lost his shit.” “Yes you do,” Jane said. “You get to be whatever you want right now.”
It seemed so normal to have a wife who picked out your yellow ties for you. Whatever that meant: normal. It had to mean not living a life at Promise. It had to at least mean that.
“Oh my God,” I said, throwing my hands in the air, feeling every bit as dramatic as I was acting. “I just told you all about it—the whole fucking purpose of this place is to make us hate ourselves so that we change. We’re supposed to hate who we are, despise it.”
“No, I think the hate yourself part about covers it.”
“My whole point,” I said, “is that what they teach here, what they believe, if you don’t trust it, if you doubt it at all, then you’re told that you’re going to hell, that not only everyone you know is ashamed of you, but that Jesus himself has given up on your soul. And if you’re like Mark, and you do believe all of this, you really do—you have faith in Jesus and this stupid Promise system, and even still, even with those things, you still can’t make yourself good enough, because what you’re trying to change isn’t changeable, it’s like your height or the shape of your ears, whatever, then
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I got that churned-up-stomach feeling you get when you wonder, upon recognizing one stupid decision you’ve made about something important, if it’s possibly only the first of many, many stupid decisions you’ve made about this important thing, and maybe is just the first clue that the whole thing will crack apart under the weight of all of those stupid decisions once they’ve piled up.
