Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science by Lucia Greenhouse

It’s close to the truth, I tell myself: an approximation. I can just be Lucia, a minister’s daughter, and that feels nearly as Wonder bread normal as being the daughter of a businessman. I am free to spend the rest of the weekend—maybe even the rest of seventh grade?—just like everyone else. I feel almost giddy as I head for the mess hall. I only hope Mimi and Mary don’t give me up.
    After lunch
, I am hanging out with some new friends. We take turns pushing each other on a tire swing. There is a cute boy named James, with blue eyes and golden hair, small like me, and he looks my way whenever I glance in his direction. Liz gets off the swing, and now it is my turn. I pull myself into the tire and grasp the end of the rope, just below where it is securely knotted. James takes hold of the tire and slowly pulls me way, way back. I can’t help but smile. He lets go, and I soar through the air. He catches me around the waist and pushes me again. With each push I fly higher, and warm to the possibility that I have a crush, and that maybe it’s mutual.
    What seems to
matter at Blake—more than what Dad does, or the fact that we don’t go to doctors—is who my family is. Lucky for me,my family—or not my family but my parents’ families—preceded me. When I meet classmates’ parents for the first time, they might tell me they knew Mom from Edina High School, or they remember the annual Christmas pageants at Highcroft, when Highcroft was still the name of the house Dad grew up in, not one of the three campuses of Blake Schools. My uncles’ younger faces can be spotted in the black-and-white team photos that hang on the school’s walls.

O CTOBER 1974
     
    In October
, the seventh-grade class parents plan the first Friday night social, a sock hop. James asks Mary to ask me if I’ll go with him. The night of the sock hop, James wears blue jeans rolled up above the ankles and a white T-shirt with a pack of fake cigarettes rolled into the sleeve. His blond hair is greased back, and he stashes a peppermint Winston behind one ear. I wear my hair pulled up in a high ponytail, Mom’s old poodle skirt from Grandma’s attic safety-pinned at the waist, white bobby socks, and a red cardigan put on backward, buttoned up the back. At the party, everyone dances as a group to oldies like “The Loco-Motion,” and “Rock Around the Clock.” When the Johnny Mathis song “Misty” comes over the loudspeaker, James’s hands go timidly to my waist, and I tentatively place mine on his shoulders. I look around the dance floor and see that others have paired off too, but I won’t look anyone in the eye, especially my mom. She is chaperoning. Mary and her friend Jay float past James and me, and she gives me the thumbs-up. I chew my upper lip nervously, trying not to smile too obviously.
    James and I win a prize for best costumes.
    The next morning Mary calls me on the phone as I am eating breakfast, watching Saturday cartoons with Sherman and Dad.
    “So?” she says. “Are you going together?”
    “
I
dough-no!”
    “You’re going together,” she declares.
    I grin.

T HANKSGIVING 1974
     
    On the day
before Thanksgiving, Mom, Dad, Grandma, Sherman, and I drive to the airport to pick up Olivia. She is now a tenth grader at Principia, a Christian Science boarding school near St. Louis, Missouri.
    Each time we meet Olivia’s plane, I harbor a vague feeling that I won’t recognize my own sister, but there she is, walking down the jetway. A sense of relief washes over me. Only two things about Olivia look different: She has a long, tiny braid on either side of her face. And now she’s taller than Mom. She drops her backpack to give us each a hug. I wonder briefly if I’ll ever catch up to her.
    Late Wednesday night, after everyone else has gone to bed, I sit with Olivia on her bed, and she makes two tiny braids for me while we listen to her new Stevie Wonder album. We don’t talk much. She plays “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light