Diary of a Misfit, page 13
That Sunday night, Roy showed up wearing a cap and a pair of pants. Lynda told me she didn’t remember who took Roy aside and explained that he’d have to wear a dress next time, but she said everyone at church agreed with the sentiment. Someone went to the front and recited Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God.”
Roy returned the next night and the night after that, and both times he wore pants. He joined an outside Bible study with Lynda, and he wore pants to those, too. Sometimes, after the studies, he’d linger and talk. Lynda said Roy told her he’d known since he was young that he ought to be a boy. At one Bible study, he said he was a man who’d been sent to earth in a woman’s frame. “Roy told me, ‘It would be just like your husband trying to go down the street in a dress. I feel the same way.’ ”
Lynda told me she’d never thought Roy was lying—he really seemed to believe he was a man—but in the 1970s, Lynda didn’t understand how his brain and body could feel so disconnected. She pressed him for a clearer explanation. Finally, at another Bible study, Roy told Lynda he’d been in an accident when he was twelve. A piece of farm equipment hit him on the head, he told her, and he hadn’t matured into a woman after that.
“She never had a menstruation, never had a period, never had children,” Lynda told me. “I doubt she ever had sex to be honest with you. She never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend that I know of.”
Maybe Roy hoped the farm accident story would give him a reprieve, but no one at the church relented. Every week, the pastor or someone else told Roy he had to wear a dress if he wanted to be Pentecostal, and every week Roy returned wearing pants. In a way, Lynda told us, she admired Roy. He must have really believed in the Pentecostal church. Otherwise, why would he have put himself through that?
“It was terribly embarrassing for her to come to our church. It really was, because she felt out of place. And to be honest, we felt out of place to have her. If she was going to be a woman, people thought she ought to look like one.”
Lynda didn’t look like any other Pentecostal I knew. All the Pentecostal girls I grew up with wore ankle-length skirts. Most had never cut their hair, so they kept their locks tied back in long braids that stretched almost as long as their skirts did. Lynda’s hair was only shoulder length. She was wearing black dress pants—women’s pants, but pants nonetheless.
“Back then,” I said, “when Roy was going to church with you, did you wear long skirts and long hair?”
Lynda shook her head yes. “Always. But Roy didn’t. Roy’s hair was cut like a man’s. Hers was cut like yours.”
She pointed at me, as if I somehow might have missed that I was the girl with man hair. I didn’t want to draw more attention to myself, so I asked Lynda if she’d stopped being Pentecostal. She said she hadn’t.
“But you cut your hair now?” I asked.
Lynda told me she’d had it cut three weeks earlier. Her hair had been falling out in hunks all year. Every time she washed her face or combed her hair, “fistfuls” fell out. After a few months, she had big bald patches across her head.
“I thought, ‘Why?’ ” she said. “If that is part of the salvation, why is God taking that away from me? Think about it. If hair is part of the salvation, if you’ve got to have long hair, why would he take it away from you? He died for your salvation, now he’s going to take some of that back? He’s going to take that hair away from me? That didn’t make sense to me.”
Lynda’s voice turned rascally and agitated. She creased her forehead in confusion, and she put a finger on her chin to show she was really thinking this dilemma through. She reminded me of myself, of the way I’d wrestled with my identity in college. I’d spent months my freshman year wondering how God could let me be attracted to women, and I’d wondered why he would condemn me to Hell for something I couldn’t stop from happening. The way I understood the Bible then, it didn’t matter if I ever kissed a girl. The thoughts alone were punishable. But why? Why did God care about hair or pants or something as innocuous as attraction?
“I went to the beauty shop,” Lynda told me. “And I said, ‘Something is wrong.’ The beautician said my hair was too long. It was getting stringy. She did cut it then, and it’s quit coming out like that.”
Lynda said that after she got her own hair cut, she started looking at other Pentecostal women differently. She noticed how many had just a few strands of hair twisted into a braid. Their hair looked scraggly, she thought, not at all godly.
“So is your pastor okay with you cutting your hair?” I asked.
Lynda shook her head no, then smiled what I thought was a forced grin. “I don’t get to teach Sunday school or sing in the choir anymore. But that’s okay. I have a personal relationship with God. I think the older I get, the more lenient I become. I’m not saying about sin, because I still believe sin is sin. Swearing. Adultery. Stealing. That’s sin. Mistreating people. Gossip. But I just don’t think God can be put in a little box and say, ‘Okay, this little group right here is going to do what you say, and everybody else is going straight to Hell.’ ”
I told Lynda I liked the way she thought. I hoped that the God I’d grown up loving wouldn’t care if we cut our hair. Lynda laughed.
“But I don’t think I could wear hair like yours,” she said. “I really don’t.”
I ran my right hand through my wavy bangs and said I didn’t have much of a choice. Even when my hair was long, it had always turned unruly in the humidity. My cowlicks were easier to tamp down when they were short.
“It’s really cute,” Lynda said. “But I personally couldn’t wear it. That comes from First Corinthians. It says if a woman has long hair, it’s a glory to her.”
She laughed. I couldn’t tell what Lynda thought of me, or what she’d thought of Roy long ago. I told myself it didn’t matter; I’d probably never see Lynda again. But listening to her reminded me of all the other people in my life who’d told me that the Bible says that the way I am is wrong. My chest burned. I had gone so long in Portland without feeling ashamed of myself, but sitting in a recliner in Lynda’s living room, all the strength I’d built elsewhere faded away. I felt eighteen again, judged, vulnerable, embarrassed for being myself. I tried to joke about my cowlicks, but the words caught in my throat.
“Mine, uh, didn’t feel like a glory when I had it long,” I said.
Lynda laughed again, and we talked for a while about other things.
After twenty minutes or so, Lynda stood, leaned on a cane she hadn’t used earlier, then walked us toward the front door. I asked her if the Pentecostal church was still near Roy’s old house, and Lynda said the congregation outgrew it long ago. Now they were in a big building on Highway 17, but new people kept joining, she said, and soon, they’d have to find a place even larger. She told us we were welcome to drive by and see it, but she didn’t invite us to attend. I ran my hand back through my short hair, and I thought Lynda must not want to relive what had happened with Roy. I knew without Lynda telling me that no Pentecostal preacher would want me in the pews. I’d learned that long ago, and I didn’t want to relive it, either.
Aubree, Aaron, and I got into the rental car, and I drove a few miles, remembering things I’d spent years trying to forget. I hung a right on Highway 17, and I drove as slow as I legally could toward town. I’d never told Aubree or Aaron why I stopped going to church. I’d never told anyone. I turned to face my friends, then I looked back at the road. The Pentecostal sanctuary appeared on the far horizon. Maybe, I thought, it was time.
Chapter Six
(1994–2001)
MY DAD LEFT the army in late 1993 with a broken ankle and lungs clogged by chemicals he inhaled during the Gulf War. We lost our free housing on the base in Georgia, so we moved across town to a moldy brown ranch house tucked against a forest slated for development. My dad became an exterminator, and my mom took a second job to help pay the rent. She still cleaned the old lady’s house on nights and weekends, but during the day, she started working at my elementary school as a teacher’s aide. Other kids teased me for having my mom at school, but I liked tiptoeing down the hallway, looking into her classroom, and waving. After school, I’d wait in the parking lot, and I’d ride with her to the old lady’s house. We did that every day until I was ten or eleven, until one afternoon, while my mom was mopping on her hands and knees, I sneaked into the old lady’s closet and pulled out one of her porcelain-head dolls. The old lady jumped out of her rocking chair and charged toward me to snatch the doll back. She sneered, then told my mom not to bring me or my brother to work with her anymore.
After the incident, my mom hired a girl from church to babysit my brother and me. Toni was twelve and tall with tawny skin and tight black curls she kept pulled back in a ponytail. She had a deep voice and breasts so big that when she first came over, my mom exclaimed, inappropriately, “Wow, Toni, you’re built like a brick house.” Toni covered her chest with her arms, and she slunk into our house. I shot my mom a look, but she rolled her eyes as if it were perfectly acceptable to tell a teenage girl how womanly she looked. Toni hated Barbie dolls but loved football, and most afternoons she chased my brother and me around the yard until the sun set. I don’t remember how many times she babysat us, but I remember the last day clearly because it was the first time anyone ever suspected I was gay.
We were playing football in the yard. My brother threw the ball, and I caught it. I ran toward the tree we’d designated as the end zone, and Toni sprinted after me, then grabbed me by the hips. She tackled me, and I collapsed against the ground, giggling as her legs pinned mine to the grass. She held my arms down. Her ponytail holder had fallen off, and her curly hair tickled my face. I brushed her hair aside and looked up at her. She stared back a few seconds too long.
“I like you,” she said.
I knew without knowing what she meant, knew that “like” meant something awful, so I squirmed out from under her and ran toward our neighbor’s yard. They had a trampoline, and I climbed up its metal side, then started jumping. Toni walked over, pulled herself up, and bounced alongside me. She seemed so much older to me then, though now I can see she was just a kid. We jumped the way children do, high and wild, but I felt tethered by an unnameable electricity. Every spring felt heavy.
“Do you like me?” Toni asked.
I told her I didn’t know. I asked her what she meant. I tried to leap higher.
“I mean, I like you,” she said. “Like, like-like.” She hopped off the trampoline and peered at me from the ground. “I know you are, too,” she said.
I plugged my ears with my fingers. I closed my eyes and jumped until it was dark, and my mother called me inside.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I could hear Toni, asking if I liked her. Her voice made my insides spark and jump. I felt drawn to Toni in ways I didn’t understand, ways I suspected were sinful even though they were devoid of sexual feelings. When I thought about Toni, I didn’t think about kissing or anything else physical. I was ten. I didn’t think about anything, really, except seeing her again.
A week later, my mom came home smelling like Clorox. She told me she needed to talk to me. My dad and brother were gone, and all I could hear was the refrigerator buzzing in the kitchen.
“I need to tell you something,” my mom said. “One of your friends is gay.”
My stomach stung with guilt or fear, and I blurted out a response as if I were gasping for air. “Toni is not my friend. I hate her.”
My mom must have asked me follow-up questions, and I must have told her what happened, but I don’t remember the details. My mom swirled around the house the rest of the evening, calling people from church and screaming every cuss word she knew. She drove to Toni’s house and chewed out her mother, then she came home and cussed some more.
By Sunday, everyone at church had heard because my mom had called and told everyone. The pastor strode up to the pulpit that morning and announced that he planned to deliver a special sermon in the evening. Afterward, he said, we’d take a vote. Neither the pastor nor my parents had ever talked much about homosexuality before Toni, but I knew somehow that what had happened between us in my front yard was a sin. I felt sick all Sunday. That night, our pastor preached out of the Old Testament. He quoted Leviticus, and he told the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities he said the Lord had destroyed as punishment for their homosexual activity. Afterward, the pastor said it was up to the congregation to decide whether we would allow Toni and her family to keep worshiping with us.
“Raise your hand if you want to rebuke Satan. Raise your hand if you want this family to leave.”
I didn’t need to look at my mother to know how she was voting. I could feel her arm brush past mine as it shot into the air. My dad must have been there, and he must have voted, but he and my brother are both missing in my memories. All I can remember is the pastor’s voice, my mother’s arm, and my own hand, timidly reaching toward Heaven to vote Toni out.
* * *
—
I TRIED FOR TWENTY years to forget Toni. I tried to forget the way her legs pressed against mine, and I tried to forget her voice, soft and pleading. I never let myself wonder how she felt when I raised my hand that Sunday night. But after I started going to Delhi to learn about Roy, I couldn’t stop thinking about Toni. I drove away from Lynda’s that afternoon in 2011 thinking I was no better than the people who’d told Roy he had to leave the Pentecostal church. Later, in the cabin, I googled Toni’s name over and over. I tried three or four spellings, but I never got a hit. I paid for a Classmates.com account, and I searched for the middle school I remembered her attending, but the school didn’t have any yearbooks online. I even messaged an old friend of my mother’s to ask if she’d kept up with Toni’s family. She hadn’t. I think I wanted to tell Toni I was sorry. I’d been so sure at ten that I had no choice, but I know now that demons wouldn’t have come to claim me if I’d said I wanted her to stay. Or maybe I wanted to tell Toni that she’d been right. Whatever she saw in me at ten was real—and eventually, the church had turned on me, too.
* * *
—
MY FAMILY MOVED BACK to Louisiana in late 1994, a year after Toni disappeared. We found another evangelical church with light shows and a six-piece band. It was called Family Church, and I loved it even more than I had Live Oak. Every Sunday felt like a professional concert. A dozen or so singers stood onstage holding microphones, and they performed Christian pop songs in thirty-minute sets. The church employed a full-time light director, and he angled blue and purple beams across the stage while someone else projected the lyrics, and we sang as a group with our eyes closed and our hands stretched toward God. My mother and I had a few favorite songs. We liked “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High” because we got to act out its verses, lowering our arms during the line about Jesus descending from Heaven, then spreading them out to mimic the cross he died on. And we liked “My Redeemer Lives” because it had a skippy, fun beat. We hopped around in circles every time the choir sang it. We loved at least a dozen others, but our number one, all-time favorite song was “Shout to the Lord.”
“Shout to the Lord,” I realized later, is the kind of song that’s designed to make listeners cry. It starts slow, with just a few piano notes and a soloist, then builds toward a key change that always—even now—breaks me down. At our church, a woman named Cheryl sang the solos in “Shout to the Lord,” and I thought hers was the most beautiful voice in the world. Listening to Cheryl transported me somewhere, closer to God, I hoped, though I worried my affection verged on sinful. Cheryl was a straight woman with a husband and a newborn son, but she had short blond hair that I found irresistible as a preteen, and sometimes, watching her from the third pew back, I worried that the inexplicable yearning I felt was the same sin that had undone Toni.
* * *
—
BEFORE I STARTED GOING to Delhi, I only told my Portland friends about church when I wanted to make fun of my past. I reenacted an exaggerated version of Trana’s exorcism. I laughed about Toni. I turned my memories into funny stories I told at parties in the kind of can-you-believe-it tone that hid all the pain I’d once felt in losing my faith. But the truth—as I came to remember it after I started learning about Roy—was that church had once felt like the only stabilizing force in my life. As I steered toward the Delhi Pentecost Tabernacle in 2011, I thought about Roy braving Sunday school in his pants, and I didn’t want to make jokes of my memories anymore.
* * *
—
I DON’T REMEMBER IF my mother began using the opiate nose spray again before or after my dad slept with his office secretary in Louisiana. But I remember my parents separated and got back together every few months during my early teenage years. We switched houses each time they did. We lived with my grandparents in a two-bedroom next to the railroad tracks, then on our own in a mouse-filled home whose foundation sank and slanted into mud. We lived with my dad in a beige apartment complex ravaged by swarming crickets, and without him in a two-bedroom near the highway before we settled, temporarily “complete,” into the single-wide trailer where the puppies were born. I felt alone in every place.
After my dad’s friend sexually assaulted my mom, our TV was always on too loud. My dad worked late, my brother annoyed me, and my mom haunted the hallways like some kind of washed-out specter. Her skin lost all its color, and most of her clothes no longer fit. She had always been curvy—an eighteen was her goal size—but she gained a bunch of weight while I was in middle school, and she couldn’t afford to buy new outfits. She spent whole days walking in circles in her nightgown, muttering to herself about my dad’s infidelities or Cam and the oak tree.
