them. Please, he breathed in and out, let me stay quiet and I’ll be nicer to James. Let me stay in one place while I sleep and I’ll never again ridicule my mother’s cooking until she cries. Please.
T he church around the corner from our street is long gone (at least in its identity as a church); for years it was left alone, the marquee blank and its plastic yellowing, although the drab add-on unit where the preacher and his family lived was rented briefly several times, always by single people who kept their curtains drawn behind the very small windows. Eventually a gay couple in their forties bought the building, oohing and ahhing at the high ceilings, laughing at the ironic potential of the altar, and envisioning many parties. They kept the windows open for days on end, letting out the smell of Christ, painting all the walls yellow and hand-oiling the floors with organic orange cleansers, shrieking with amusement, playing David Byrne or chaotic piano ensembles. But different sorts of noises began to echo out the windows, and the two gay men became one gay man who did not find the yellows to his suit anymore and certainly did not keep the windows open.
But: it was a church, and there was a preacher, and there was a preacher’s daughter, and her name was Heather, and Heather was in the same grade as Jackson and me, and we did something bad to Heather.
She had the brand of eerily white-blond hair that does not get darker with age, skin just as pale, and slits of brown eyes. Her father had encouraged her to befriend the children in the neighborhood, after her arrival in the third grade, and she took a special liking to me. Perhaps because I lived with just my father, perhaps because I did not attend church, perhaps because I was fearless on the rope swing that hung from the oak tree in the front yard. I didn’t want her around. I pushed her too high; she wrapped her legs tight around the two-by-six and squealed as if being held over a fire; I pushed harder and pretended to misunderstand her cries as joy.
Heather was always regurgitating bits of her father’s sermons. Possibly she didn’t yet believe them, but they were the only bits of conversation she had to make, and she wanted badly to be my friend. I was quick and vile in response, and Heather didn’t seem to mind one way or another. It seemed to her that as long as both of us were making sounds, that meant we were bonding. She wanted to play innocuous games with my dolls. “Pretend,” she would say, “pretend she has to go to a dance, but, but”—her imagination was for shit. “But what , Heather?” I’d reply. “But her house is on fire? But Spanish pirates are about to kidnap her?” It was no use. Heather just dressed and redressed the dolls, asked me what I thought of the pink shoes withthe blue dress. When I complained, my father said I had to be nice to her, but I think he found the way her normalcy intricately tortured me privately amusing. At dinner when she said please and thank you and talked about heaven, he had to suppress a smirk while I notably slammed my milk glass, scraped my teeth on my fork, made fart noises in my elbow. “Stop, Ida,” he said sternly, but later laughed until he cried and told me I was his favorite daughter. But I am your only daughter, I would say. That’s right, he said with a firm furrow of the forehead, the only one . When he said “only,” it meant something different.
Heather got the hint, or at least gave up trying. With the eventual relegation of dolls, the more complex math problems, the beginnings of breasts, Heather’s insipid nature leaned more toward cruelty. We arrived at junior high school and she took to carrying a Bible with her in the hallways, even leading this as a trend of sorts among other girls in high-buttoning shirts and beige pants. When we passed she took to tilting her head in mock sympathy and God-blessing me, she and her comrades snickering in my wake. In classes she raised
Barbara Bettis
Claudia Dain
Kimberly Willis Holt
Red L. Jameson
Sebastian Barry
Virginia Voelker
Tammar Stein
Christopher K Anderson
Sam Hepburn
Erica Ridley