the road, flip-flops snapping against our feet, line up on the dock in life jackets and bathing suits worn thin on our backsides, later tip each other over in canoes. One afternoon, the canoe I was in was ambushed and I came up under it again and again, my body unable to conceive of any other way out of the water. I knocked my head against the over-turned canoe until I stopped, rested in the bubble of air between boat and water, alone, wet and dark. When the counsellors righted the boat, they wondered why I had stayed there, clinging to the beam of an over-turned seat. It was the first time that I knew my body was something that could also betray me. A moth and the dark underbelly of the canoe, a light.
There were strange names for things at camp: mess hall, canteen, chapel. Chapel was church and we had to go every day, after dinner. Chapel looked like a chapel should, small and white and pointed, complete with a steeple. It was like a church made from the folded hands of children –
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people
. All God’s children, with seersucker sundresses, shorts and skin that smelled of lake and dirt, lined up in pews in the heat-trappedchapel until we stuck to each other. The pastor from the Baptist church told us that our bodies were not our own, they were temples of Christ. Our bodies vessels for God’s will. Shipping vessels, I thought, like pieces of the Battleship game. I was a boat on my way to battle, God’s will filling the holes so I couldn’t be hit.
A-3 miss. F-9, miss. D-4, miss
. Later, my counsellor would tell us that girls were more like vases – delicate and fragile, God’s will the water that would allow us to hold things as beautiful as flowers. I didn’t like this analogy. Flowers died after a few days. The water left in the bottom of vases was thick and green and it stank.
Our bodies were also temples. Each evening, after taking horseback riding lessons or making useless crafts out of burlap, seeds, and glue, we met before dinner for cabin talk. All it took was one girl, a memory of her grade three teacher, his hands in her panties behind the desk while he explained subtraction. Four other girls choked out what was locked behind the temple doors: a grandpa who liked a bare bum on his lap; a cousin who played doctor until he was too old, too rough; a father who tickled the wrong places and groaned; the feeling of back-seat vinyl under the weight of an old family friend. Five out of the ten of us. I tried to find myself in the numbers, hoped something would come to me that would have me choking up tears.
One summer, Krista had agreed to come with me to camp. Each night, we sang and swayed with the rest of the kids at the evening service. During one of these services, a camp counsellor was murmuring into a microphone about coming up to the front. We didn’t need to say anything, she assured us, we could just rise and accept the Holy Spirit into our very own hearts.Another counsellor was playing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” again and again on an aged electronic keyboard. One by one, kids were going to the front, some with hands raised and peaceful smiles, some racked with sobs and being comforted by a row of counsellors, a clean-scrubbed support team nodding empathetically. Even I had felt something as I crooned and swayed. Later, I would explain to myself that I had been afflicted with religious fervour. At the time, I felt God. God had felt like air in my limbs, an expanding chasm of peace replacing whatever had been there before. I would know later that God felt a little like getting high. Whatever it was, Krista felt it too. She didn’t look peaceful but her mouth was set and her eyes were focused so intently in front of her that I was sure she could rearrange air with them. She wanted something. Krista pushed past me and went up to the front, the sign that she had accepted Jesus into her heart, and stood there rigid, not sobbing
There were strange names for things at camp: mess hall, canteen, chapel. Chapel was church and we had to go every day, after dinner. Chapel looked like a chapel should, small and white and pointed, complete with a steeple. It was like a church made from the folded hands of children –
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people
. All God’s children, with seersucker sundresses, shorts and skin that smelled of lake and dirt, lined up in pews in the heat-trappedchapel until we stuck to each other. The pastor from the Baptist church told us that our bodies were not our own, they were temples of Christ. Our bodies vessels for God’s will. Shipping vessels, I thought, like pieces of the Battleship game. I was a boat on my way to battle, God’s will filling the holes so I couldn’t be hit.
A-3 miss. F-9, miss. D-4, miss
. Later, my counsellor would tell us that girls were more like vases – delicate and fragile, God’s will the water that would allow us to hold things as beautiful as flowers. I didn’t like this analogy. Flowers died after a few days. The water left in the bottom of vases was thick and green and it stank.
Our bodies were also temples. Each evening, after taking horseback riding lessons or making useless crafts out of burlap, seeds, and glue, we met before dinner for cabin talk. All it took was one girl, a memory of her grade three teacher, his hands in her panties behind the desk while he explained subtraction. Four other girls choked out what was locked behind the temple doors: a grandpa who liked a bare bum on his lap; a cousin who played doctor until he was too old, too rough; a father who tickled the wrong places and groaned; the feeling of back-seat vinyl under the weight of an old family friend. Five out of the ten of us. I tried to find myself in the numbers, hoped something would come to me that would have me choking up tears.
One summer, Krista had agreed to come with me to camp. Each night, we sang and swayed with the rest of the kids at the evening service. During one of these services, a camp counsellor was murmuring into a microphone about coming up to the front. We didn’t need to say anything, she assured us, we could just rise and accept the Holy Spirit into our very own hearts.Another counsellor was playing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” again and again on an aged electronic keyboard. One by one, kids were going to the front, some with hands raised and peaceful smiles, some racked with sobs and being comforted by a row of counsellors, a clean-scrubbed support team nodding empathetically. Even I had felt something as I crooned and swayed. Later, I would explain to myself that I had been afflicted with religious fervour. At the time, I felt God. God had felt like air in my limbs, an expanding chasm of peace replacing whatever had been there before. I would know later that God felt a little like getting high. Whatever it was, Krista felt it too. She didn’t look peaceful but her mouth was set and her eyes were focused so intently in front of her that I was sure she could rearrange air with them. She wanted something. Krista pushed past me and went up to the front, the sign that she had accepted Jesus into her heart, and stood there rigid, not sobbing
Similar Books
