TOTAL ADVENTURE

On Valentine’s Day, Mom picked me up from the school nurse’s office, where I sat begging my upset stomach to settle back down. Then she came home to finish getting ready for her luncheon. Usually when she had company for lunch, she baked a quiche (I’d often be enlisted to grate the cheese and poke holes into the bottom of the crust so it didn’t puff up with air) or assembled a rice pilaf with chicken, slivered almonds, and chopped vegetables. I was too out of sorts to keep track of what her Valentine’s menu was, but I knew she was expecting a visit from Mrs. Nussbaum, another air force wife she’d met years earlier at the Hospitality House. Mrs. Nussbaum was one of my favorite guests because she always arrived with a gift for me, usually books or toys from the Christian bookstore where she worked. Her life was devoted to spreading the word of Christ, and she carried pocket-sized leatherette editions of the New Testament to hand out to the people she met from day to day. Sometimes, she returned her entire paycheck to the bookstore because she’d given away so many Bibles. Mrs. Nussbaum was certain that I already knew Jesus, but as a special Valentine’s gift, she brought me a New International Version Children’s Bible and a heart-shaped box of assorted chocolates. When I thanked her, instead of saying “You’re welcome,” she pinched me on my cheeks a bit too hard and for a few seconds too long, saying what a sweet girl I was.

Mrs. Nussbaum was from England. As a young woman during World War II, she had worked in an ammunitions factory. It was during the war that she met Mr. Nussbaum, an American GI, a very earnest, very animated man whose face, when he was talking about the many wars and disasters across the globe, would take on an expression of exhilaration and anger. For the longest time, I thought Mr. Nussbaum was from England, too; after so many years of living with his wife, he had begun to emulate her British accent. He’d also adopted her faith. He was born a Jew, and Mrs. Nussbaum had grown up a not-very-devout Protestant, but after the war, the two of them had been baptized together as Christians.

What little I knew about Jews came from a book of my mom’s called The Hiding Place, about Dutch sisters named Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, who had hidden Jews in their home in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. They were Christians who sought to share God’s love with others. When the ten Booms were discovered by the Nazis and eventually taken to a German concentration camp, they continued to try to spread the word of God with the other prisoners and even with the Nazi guards. It didn’t occur to me until many years later that the subjects in The Hiding Place were the Christians and the Nazis and the objects were the Jews. At the time, I was taken with every coincidence—or miracle, as the book described each of them—that prevented the sisters from being killed or separated from one another. During the war, Mrs. Nussbaum had been on the receiving end of a miracle, too, when she traded shifts with a coworker in the ammunitions factory on the very day that the factory was bombed. Such coincidences gave me a giddy, otherworldly feeling, though when I thought about it later, of course I realized that a great many other miracles that might have been performed during the war were not.

The Nussbaums were a good twenty years older than my parents. Whenever my mother and father brought me along on visits to their home—a white stucco one-story with hedges and shutters that gave the impression of a gingerbread house—I was offered a seat at the kitchen table where a plate of cookies and a Bible storybook awaited. The adults would settle into the living room, drinking coffee and making conversation. They’d touch upon topics from the news or swap stories about life in the air force, but most of their conversations were about God. Even their discussions of current events tended to loop around to the Lord; either He wouldn’t like what was going on, or He had foretold it someplace in the Bible, if you stacked up all the details in just the right way.

Mr. Nussbaum was an expert on Bible prophecy. When he began to explain how an event happening in the world lined up with one or another Bible reference, his eyes lit up, as though he were furious with humanity, but eager, too, to see God’s promises fulfilled. He wasn’t the only person trying to match up current events with biblical prophecy; I suppose it was a compelling pastime, like a heavenly scavenger hunt, for someone with the right command of the Bible. In the mornings, Mom watched The 700 Club on TV while I got ready for school. More than once, Pat Robertson, the host, promised viewers that the end of the world was coming in just a couple of years. When he tried to tell the future like that, Mom would reprimand him, saying to the TV screen, “No one knows the day or the hour,” but she didn’t change the channel, and every morning the show was on again while I got dressed or ate my breakfast. Sunday evenings, there was an old white-haired man we’d sometimes flip past on our way to Hee Haw or The Muppet Show. He waved a Bible in the air promising the End of Days was nigh and casting curses on evildoers and disbelievers. Once, he asked God to cover all the wicked people’s bodies with pus-filled boils. His haunted, bloodshot eyes and mop of thick white hair terrified me. I was always relieved to hear my father snicker and call him an “old fool.” Our God struck me as different from that man’s God, though we called Him “Heavenly Father” just the same. It was confusing to me, especially because such men seemed to find so much to hate in the world, a world that, no matter all the rampant sin, still managed to hold a great deal of interest for me.

On Valentine’s Day, while my mother and Mrs. Nussbaum sat in the dining room having lunch, I lay stretched out on the couch. My classmates still had two hours left of squirming at their desks, though they’d surely be rewarded with palm-sized boxes of sweet tarts and conversation hearts before the day was over. My mother had already told me that if I ate the chocolates before my stomach had a chance to recover, they’d only make me feel worse, so I was distracting myself by looking through the Bible. It was square and squat, with a hard cover and tissue-paper pages that crinkled between my fingers. My parents each had their own Bible printed on the same onionskin, with gold edging and columns of Christ’s words in red ink. Holding one of my very own made me suspect that I might be capable of hearing God’s word and taking on its wisdom, which was perhaps part of the reason for the next thing I decided to do. I am eight years old, I might just as well have said to myself, and since I have been afforded this day, this book, this absence of anything better to pass the time, why not read for myself about God’s plan for the Second Coming?

It was a sunny afternoon, and daylight barged in through the window at my back, casting a blinding square of light on the TV screen. I heard birds calling to one another outside and wind in the leaves. Farther off, there were cars moving along the streets of our neighborhood, a traffic I knew how to convince myself sounded just like the tide. A room away, I heard my mother and Mrs. Nussbaum talking above the sounds of knives and forks. But in the lines and pages before me, I soon found myself lost in a labyrinth of strange tidings that, added to whatever rumbled through my intestines, pitched me into a bizarre and unsettled state. To call it nightmarish would be to discount the extreme foreignness of the imagery; the demons and plagues and fiery scrolls were like nothing my imagination could have fashioned on its own. Neither did it sound much like the moment of glory all the church hymns foretold: the homecoming of Christ on a cloudburst and a golden chariot. No, this was worse even than the mad Christians foretelling doom on TV. It was even more punitive, with an added measure of all the ghastly Halloween stuff my mother had sought to steer me clear of. My heart raced and my mouth filled with fear, just like it did when whoever was flipping channels would linger for a moment on the white-haired man casting aspersions from his television pulpit. Was my mind playing tricks on me? Had intestinal unrest distorted all sense of what my eyes were reading? I kept shaking my head, trying to snap things back into proper focus. But why? I asked almost aloud. The God who’d set a thing like that in motion probably would cover people in boils. It couldn’t be right. Perhaps it was the kind of thing I ought to have been able to arrest, like a headache or fever, by shutting my eyes and going to sleep. Only I couldn’t put the book down.

Already I was having dreams that seemed to bring me up close to that eerie inevitability. In one that recurred from time to time, it is that dark hour between hours when the night seems to hang perfectly still while dawn watches from just beyond the horizon. The hour when anxiety sits up in the bed, wanting company; when the phone rings with the kind of news that would cause my parents to make preparations for attending some faraway funeral. In the dream, we are all of us awake, standing around the kitchen table, dressed for church or a funeral, silent and waiting. Even the empty spaces in the house are fraught, the air palpably charged. When I move, the fine hairs on my arms feel the presence of something invisible passing through.

My father remembers there is something he must collect from the garage, and adrenaline spikes my chest. It is important that all of us remain together. My mother looks at him with a message in her eyes. And then I remember what has come over us: we are waiting for God.

Of course! God will be there soon, very soon, just as He promised, and so my father has to rush if he doesn’t want to be left behind. Or else it is one of my brothers who needs to race upstairs and change clothes or my mother who has to step away for a moment to peel one or two more potatoes for the meal none of us will ever sit down to eat.

I was raised to believe in a moment when the earth would literally reject the laws of science, and the dead would spring from the grave to join Christ, who would be visible in a cluster of low-lying clouds. I certainly never heard any Christian offer up an alternate take on the Second Coming, never heard it rationalized into something plainer, easier to comprehend. It was not a metaphor but rather the moment when metaphor itself would fall away, laying all the many mysteries of God’s kingdom naked before us, fully revealed. Not even my father, whose sense of faith was flexible enough to coexist with his equally ardent devotion to science, had managed to soften the Second Coming into anything penetrable by reason or logic. No Christian I’d ever met had consented to so much as blink an eye at the notion of the Rapture, at least not publicly. Did they wrestle with it privately? Were they as appalled by what the Bible foretold as I was, reading it verbatim for the very first time? Nobody said anything about it. Time and again throughout my life, I’d heard other Christians talk about how soon and very soon Christ would reappear, and how glorious the day would be when we found ourselves standing before Him at the Final Judgment. Having happened upon no alternative, I’d accepted it as one of the nonnegotiable elements of my faith, resigning myself to the possibility that one minute, I might be reading a book or talking to a friend or even sitting on the toilet, and the next, the whole planet could be standing there watching as the sky opened like a cracked egg. It could be anything: a flash of light as if from a nuclear blast (like the terrible blast I’d seen in documentary footage from the hydrogen bomb at Hiroshima, only infinitely bigger) followed by a weightless silence into which we’d simply lift off and drift. Whatever it was, it would happen in the blink of an eye during which every second or third person the world over would vanish into thin air. Even though such images repelled me, I couldn’t not believe; it wasn’t an option. Belief was stitched into me, soldered to my bones. It was almost as though I was born believing, as though I had believed even before I was born. Even if I had wanted to, even if I could have found a way to erase all the believing that lay beneath the things I could discern with my eyes and ears and beneath the things I could pick apart with my mind, how pigheaded and piddling would I feel on that final day, anchored to the earth while my mother and father and brothers and sisters all filed up to Heaven on an escalator to the clouds?

My stomach had felt so bad that morning at school that I’d had to run down the hallway to the bathroom more than once, but that biological drama seemed far-off suddenly; it was paltry in comparison to the upheaval the Bible was now telling me would and must come to pass: the plagues God was waiting to unleash, the suffering He had planned for us. Seeing it in what almost read as recipe form, I felt newly queasy, fearful for the world that would one day begin to ripple and churn under the necessity of such a strange, cruel destiny. I lay on the sofa, stuck in place, panicked but still, understanding there was nowhere to run. I couldn’t get off the planet, couldn’t escape God. I felt like one of the people in the old black-and-white Godzilla movie, the ones who look so tiny and frenzied as the giant lizard tromps through their city.

I let the sounds in the dining room come into focus. Teacups and saucers. The lid being lifted off the big metal cake saver. Quietly, tentatively, I took the cellophane off the box of chocolates and opened the lid. There was a thick brown sheet of pillowy waxed paper protecting the top layer (there were two layers!) from molestation. I lifted it off and looked at the smooth candies, each guarding the secret of its contents. I breathed in the air from the box: a medley of dark, sweet notes, but then, remembering the sternness of my mother’s warning, I replaced the waxy blanket and the heart-shaped lid and returned my attention to the book. Mom was right. If I ate a chocolate while my stomach was still out of kilter, it would only stir up more trouble; the candy would taste good for a few moments before landing in my stomach like a grenade.

I felt uneasy around the Christians who claimed to long for Judgment Day, the ones who professed their faith in God too vehemently. Not the Nussbaums, who talked about God as if they were His fans, as if He were someone incredibly famous whom they’d met just once. No, my distrust was reserved for the people who made an exaggerated effort to flaunt their godliness. The ones who went out of their way to join hands and pray aloud in busy restaurants, as if doing so would shame others into giving their lives over to God. And, worse, the ones who worried to the point of distraction about the sin going on in other people’s houses, the hate-filled men on TV, and the pious, grim-faced people in real life who sowed guilt every chance they got. And here suddenly was the Bible itself, giving me reason to feel not just discomfort but outright fear at the prospect of humankind being stomped to pulp like grapes, of beautiful cities being made to crumble despite the fact that they, too, were full of God’s handiwork. It was maddening, crushing, bespeaking a God of fury rather than love. Was it fool talk? I didn’t dare go so far as to call it that. Instead, I tried consoling myself with the odds that it would likely happen in a future so distant I’d already be gone.

I wasn’t alone in wanting to reject a portion of Christendom. Sometimes, when my father heard tell of what another Christian had said or done, he’d blurt out a word like asinine. And whenever the usual debate between creation and evolution came up in conversation, he seemed rather relaxed, suggesting there must be more to the question than meets the eye. “Couldn’t seven days in God’s realm be the equivalent of millions of years in ours?” he’d ask, smiling and leaning into the conversation, which with luck might then be permitted to drift toward some bit of Popular Science or Nature magazine. With that single gesture, he’d opened up a whole range of ecstatic possibility in my mind. He’d given me a combat-free zone, a space where contradictions—like a spectacular Big Bang and God’s originating Let there be light—might coexist, an access to the world of faith that did not require me to relinquish access to my faith in the world.

That Valentine’s Day afternoon, with the darkly hallucinatory book of Revelation open in my lap, I longed to arrive at my own kind of hybrid understanding, a view capable of assuring me that faith—an amplitude and generosity of spirit—might somehow be compatible with the vision of the future unfolding before me in line after horrific line. But, with my stomach roiling and my eyes racing back and forth across the text, wanting to squint shut but also ravenous to see where it all led, I didn’t as yet know how to get there.

I suppose I could’ve scrambled to my feet and interrupted my mother’s lunch: “Excuse me, Mommy, but…” Then what would I have said? How would I have fit my fear into words? Even if I could have, my mother would probably have sought to soothe my distress by quoting a hymn: Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey, a refrain that sometimes replayed in my head without my seeming to summon it. If he’d been home to ask, my father might’ve been able to appease me by saying a thing like: “Imagine how strange it would feel to visit a future two or three thousand years away. What words could you use to describe something that doesn’t yet exist in the world you know?” But it wouldn’t have been enough. I was as knotted and tied up in my heart and my head as I was in my stomach, only with nowhere to run.

After her lunch with my mother was over, I thanked Mrs. Nussbaum again for the gift, and I tried smiling more demurely so she wouldn’t be able to catch quite as firm a hold on my cheeks, though she managed to get in a good, long squeeze despite my efforts.

That evening, I said nothing about what was on my mind. I didn’t want my mother to take the book away from me, nor did I want reassurance of what it said. I wanted something I didn’t yet know how to name—something I instinctively knew I ought not try to put into words. Some kind of crawl space that might provide me with an out, an alternate ending, a gentler version of God that didn’t make Him seem like He’d decided to turn on us so emphatically. What alarmed me most was sensing that it was a single “us” that the book of Revelation described, that Christians like me and Christians like the ones I instinctively disliked were thrown into the same unholy soup with people who denied God’s existence outright or who acknowledged it only with cool apathy.

Later that night, Wanda called from LA to wish Mom, Dad, Michael, and me a happy Valentine’s Day (Jean and Conrad were already away at school by then). When the receiver got handed to me, I told her about my fears. I must have chosen her because she was good at making light of things, was always just a movement away from laughter. Often her irreverence was frustrating. When I’d been littler, sometimes she’d held me on her lap and then, without warning, opened her knees wide and let me almost drop onto the floor, laughing at the shock and betrayal on my face. Sometimes she’d pinched me with her toes, giggling when my eyes filled up with water. But I also remember turning to her one night, when, despite eating my fill at dinner, I woke up hungry. I might have gotten scolded for coming back into the kitchen and asking to be fed; I knew better than to get up after I’d already been put to bed. So I’d found a way of getting Wanda’s attention, and she’d sat with me as I ate a packet of smoked almonds she’d dug out of her purse. I knew that Wanda was on my side, and I knew she believed in the Bible. She’d sought out a church to attend when she left for college. When she came back home for weekend visits, she helped out in the Sunday school classes at our church. Confronted with such an onerous text, Jean might have felt much like I did: afraid and put off. Michael would likely have wanted to take advantage of my fears, turning my confidence into a prank he and his high school friends could capitalize upon. Even Conrad, whose college studies were aimed at staking out a place for himself in medicine, wouldn’t have had our eldest sister’s determination to quell my fears while also affirming God’s word.

So I told Wanda about the book of Revelation and about how anxious and afraid it made me. It was dark outside. The window gave back my own reflection in the kitchen light. Her voice was buoyant, bouncy. She said, “Don’t worry, Kitten. If it happens, it’ll be a total adventure.” That it meant everything, the whole apocalyptic chain of events. It was a lumping together of the good and the ghastly, a breezy, offhand dismissal of nuance. It lightened things for me, told me to let go of trying to plan for something so far-off and far-out. Not only did her it begin to yank me out of the spin cycle my thoughts had sucked me into, but her emphasis on the word total, and the drawn-out valley-girl inflection she’d adopted, also helped drain my thoughts of their dark hysteria. Wanda, the first of us to leave home, must have known about adventure. Sometimes, she brought girls home with her from college who told stories about hitchhikers or skiing accidents—girls with alcoholic sisters or dead parents. Girls who were kind and happy but who had also survived perilous things. Girls who had lived. “Wanda is my wanderer,” Mom would sometimes say. And that was what Wanda seemed to be striving for, with her sense of broad wonder, her appetite for anything. Perhaps she was right. Why shouldn’t I look forward to a chance at total adventure?

Hanging up the phone, I could feel my body begin to unclench in relief, and the first thing I remembered was the chocolates. I walked back over to the box, which I’d left on the coffee table atop the TV Guide, and picked out a smooth round piece from the top layer. I bit down, expecting affirmation of my new, easier state of mind. To my intense disappointment, the candy was a cherry cordial, so hyperbolically sweet I sat there for a moment with the half-eaten morsel in one hand and the other hand cupped under my chin, trying to decide whether to spit the thing out.

—

No one else ever appears in my recurring dream about God and my family. The seven of us move around quietly, with a kind of nervous purpose, like the Jews hidden in the secret annex of the ten Boom sisters’ house. I’d always awaken before we could be found, before God could come to collect us and transport us to Heaven. In the dark center of night, hours from dawn, I’d lie still in bed, stranded, caught between competing currents of feeling: disbelief that salvation could really be as literal as all that and a strange, powerful nostalgia for the very years I was in the process of living, when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.