In Mrs. Miller’s art class that spring, we had to draw mandalas. We were all juniors and seniors, upperclassmen taking an elective art class. The other kids at my table were two Korean American guys and a white golfer. The Korean guys were always talking about their Korean Catholic church. They also talked about rap, their ball caps turned backward on their heads. The golfer would insert himself into those conversations. Except for passing art materials, they ignored me. They didn’t make fun of me and for that, at least, I was grateful to them.
Some people made their mandalas abstract and geometric, more or less well-executed imitations of Tibetan and Indian patterns. I made mine a circle of angels dancing around a central golden orb. Mrs. Miller had said that some artists and monks made mandalas as a spiritual practice; making my mandala—the angels as graceful and flowing as I could muster—felt spiritual to me. I concentrated on my project, my focus drowning out discussions of Cypress Hill and Tupac.
“Why are you drawing angels?” one of the Korean boys asked one day.
I thought he was going to say something mean.
“Because. I don’t know,” I said quietly, looking up and smiling. I thought a submissive smile might stave off an attack, in the way a dog crouches low and wags his tail.
But he wasn’t making fun of me.
“Do you go to church?” he asked gently.
“No.”
The golfer and the other boy were now watching us.
“Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“You should just believe then.” He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his painting. The rest of the semester, I smiled shyly at him when he sat down at the table, but we never talked again.
• • •
Sometime that fall, Marilyn had gotten saved. She had not officially declared this to my grandfather and me, but I could tell from not-so-subtle signs that she had: She never missed a Sunday at her warehouse church. She began going to Bible study on Tuesday nights. Every evening, she read from her brand-new Bible and laboriously filled out her Bible study guide. She began reading books with showy clip art and words like “discipleship” and “spirit-filled” in the title. She wrote scriptures on white index cards and taped them to the bathroom mirror so that she could memorize them while she brushed her teeth.
Even though she was saved, she still worked for the store, ordering pornographic tapes and sex toys, labeling them, counting money—all the things she had always done. But now she did them while she listened to Christian talk radio, Christian easy listening, Focus on the Family, and The Word for the Day with Dr. McGee. And because she listened to these shows all the time, it meant I did too.
Marilyn’s Christian radio poured from the kitchen, her cabin, the car. It assaulted my ears with a trained interrogator’s incessant repetition: Are you saved? Would you like a closer relationship with God? Do you know where you will spend eternity? Words rang in my head like the echo of a bell: sin, hell, salvation, spirit, and above all, Jesus. Jesus, the refrain of soft-rock songs. Jesus, the repeated exclamation of preachers during broadcast sermons. Jesus, the person I was supposed to pray to for the forgiveness of my sins, redemption, eternal life—the list was endless.
Even though she was saved, Marilyn still drank. I thought she drank because she was unhappy, because she was a Christian stuck running a porn store. I thought she drank because my grandfather was so hard to live with. I thought she drank because she didn’t love him. Part of me thought she drank because I did not love her enough.
Every afternoon as I walked from high school to Gil’s barbershop, every evening as I tried to sleep, important questions wrestled each other in my mind: If people who don’t believe in Jesus go to hell, why should I believe in Jesus just to be safe? Isn’t that like supporting a tyrant? And how can you start believing in something you already don’t believe in? And why is it your fault you can’t believe in something? If God is good and fair, why would he send you to hell for not believing in something you tried and failed to believe in? And if he’d send you to hell for it, why would you want to believe in him anyway? They were not questions that answered themselves easily; I fought belief and unbelief simultaneously. I was tired, worn down by the fight.
• • •
One night I lay in my bunk watching Casablanca. I’d watched the video so many times I almost had the script memorized. Sometimes I mouthed the words along with the movie, gesturing with the actors. I would have been mortified if anyone had ever caught me:
RICK: How can you close me up, on what grounds?
CAPTAIN RENAULT: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
WAITER, handing Renault money on a silver tray: Your winnings, sir.
RENAULT: Oh, thank you. Renault pockets the cash.
But that night, the radio from Marilyn’s office blared into my cabin. The later she stayed up, the more she drank—and the more she drank, the louder the radio got. Christian talk show mixed in with the movie’s soundtrack until the film was finally overwhelmed. Instead of Bogey and Bergmann, all I could hear was Focus on the Family, or something like it, and I found myself listening:
“I was addicted to pornography,” a husband haltingly admitted. “I watched it in hotels every time I traveled for business. I found it in magazines. I called 1–900 numbers. I was squandering my beloved family’s precious resources on this filth, this degrading, ungodly pollution.”
“I prayed for my husband every night,” his wife piped up, her clear voice trembling a little at the edges. “He thought he was keeping it a secret from me, but of course, I knew.”
“You were saved at this time?” the host gently asked.
“Yes, I was. And I just prayed every night that the light of Christ would enter my husband’s soul and show him the way to Salvation.”
The host asked, “And it did?”
“Yes, it did,” the husband said. “And the moment Christ entered my life, my addiction to porn vanished.”
I listened to this, and then I went to Marilyn’s office. She sat crying at her desk, and soon I was crying too. I turned the radio down, and we moved to her bed and sat down next to each other, our feet dangling off the edge. Her eyes were trained on her bookshelf, looking at nothing. I watched her, the way her face had taken on a weathered look over the years, the way her jawline was puffy now, bloated, the way her eyelids sagged over her sad eyes, the way she always slouched now, the way her stomach sat on her thighs, the way her mouth had melted into an almost permanent frown. I thought for a second of her affair, back when she was younger, back when she was maybe still happy.
“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked her. “You should just leave. You should divorce Daddy.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said, still staring straight ahead.
“Yes, you could.”
“Well, what about you?” She looked at me.
“I’ll be okay.” I pulled my legs onto the bed, glad that she was considering leaving. “We can still see each other. I just want you to be happy.”
“I can’t leave Richard.”
“Yes, yes, you can. I’ll look after him.”
“No, I can’t ask you to do that.” She turned back to the bookshelf. “He’s my husband. It’s my Christian duty to take care of him.” Language like that was still new out of her mouth; I wasn’t used to it.
“No. I can look after him. We’ll be fine,” I said. I tried to smile. “Please, just leave him. I want you to be happy.”
I knew I could look after him: I was sixteen. I was almost done learning to drive; I could get my driver’s license. I could pick stuff up at the store. I imagined the happy life Marilyn would lead on land, in a house or an apartment, how we’d visit each other on weekends. I was desperate for her to leave.
She interrupted my planning. “What’ll I do for money?”
“You could get a job.”
“I don’t know how to do anything.”
“Yes, you do! You run a business. You know how to do lots of stuff!”
“No, I couldn’t get a job, not one that would make enough money. Besides, I’m too old. No one would hire me.”
“You’re not old.” I sighed. My happy vision for her was fading.
She put a soft arm around me. “Besides, I can’t leave you alone to look after him. You need to live your own life. You need to go to college and meet a good man and everything. I’ll just live through you.”
I didn’t say anything, but I knew that she was giving me permission to leave her—to, as she said, live my own life. I also knew that to leave home was to abandon her, to give her up to her unhappiness with my grandfather, her unhappiness with her life. I knew that she was making a sacrifice for me and that to take her up on it would be a profoundly selfish thing for me to do. But before I made it back to my own cabin, before I’d even gotten up from my seat beside her, I already knew what choice I was going to make. I was going to be selfish. I was going to get away from home. I was going to live.
Marilyn got me to college; I wouldn’t have gone without her. She helped me pick four schools from the National Review guide: Notre Dame, University of Chicago, University of San Francisco, and Sewanee. I picked Notre Dame because it had a history I knew from movies and because I knew Dee would be excited about it, being Irish and quasi-Catholic. I picked Chicago because they had small classes and gargoyles, and Marilyn said it was a good school. I picked San Francisco because it was closer to home, and it would make my grandfather happy; I had no intention of ever going there. I picked Sewanee, a liberal arts college in Tennessee, because its campus was in the middle of ten thousand acres of undeveloped forest on the Cumberland Plateau and had a student-staffed volunteer fire department, which for some reason tickled my fancy. She let me apply to two UC schools as backups.
Marilyn took me on a summer trip to visit colleges, driving us from Chicago down to Tennessee in a rented car, stopping in Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave, while Pete looked after my grandfather. She was patient when I was too shy to talk to college tour guides or ask admissions counselors important questions, patient when I cringed with embarrassment. After we returned, she sat at her desk late in the night, navigating her way through financial aid forms (we didn’t qualify) and loan applications (no one would give my parents one). She proofread my essays for me. Most importantly, she convinced my grandfather to set aside the rest of his eye settlement for college and to use some of the money they made on the store for school instead of the boat. She finally wore him down. If I got enough of a scholarship, she told me, and the store income kept up, and they kept juggling credit cards, we’d be able to afford a private school or, failing that, a UC. She didn’t want me to be distracted by a job during school because she’d had to work to put herself through Berkeley. It was one of her biggest gifts to me.
I filled out admission and scholarship applications. I listed awards that I’d won: Most Inspirational in swimming, National Merit Commended Student, a writing award from the National Council of Teachers of English, prizes in French, memberships in honor societies, and so on. I listed honors and AP courses, extracurricular activities, and service groups. My transcript was a line of As, interrupted only once by a B. When I held those applications—stacks of paper clipped neatly together—it was like I was holding someone else’s achievements, someone else’s life. That person seemed smart, industrious, normal. Was that really me? But then I’d see my name typed at the top of each form: Kelly Michelle Grey. That was my name; that person was me. I was proud of her.
In the spring of my senior year, a series of thick envelopes arrived in the mail at Josette’s house: acceptances from everywhere I’d applied and an invitation from Sewanee for an all-expense-paid visit to compete for a scholarship.
That weekend in March, I wandered through Gothic buildings swarmed with ivy, hiked through damp woods to waterfalls, attended classes about the French Revolution and cellular respiration, listened to the lilt and melody of a half-dozen different southern accents. I climbed stone steps worn down in the middle by generations of students before me and thought of a line from MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” which we’d read in sophomore English class: “Silent as the sleeve-worn stone / Of casement ledges where the moss has grown.” I interviewed with men who wore bow ties. I’d never seen someone wearing a bow tie before.
The night before I flew home, I walked in a warm rain on a deserted street in the dark and felt completely safe. I passed an old cemetery, groves of hundred-year-old trees, the Episcopal chapel with its intricate rose window—something I recognized as a mandala—shining like a jewel. Standing in front of it, I felt warm and light, close to God, to my real self. I was free to stay out and walk as long as I wanted to; there was no need to call home or to worry about my grandfather being angry about dinner, no way to monitor Marilyn’s alcohol intake. I didn’t have to look after them because there was no way I could look after them. The night was truly dark there, not the orange-hued twilight of the harbor. The clouds cleared. I could see stars.
As I walked that night, I cried for love of a place I’d only just met, for a life I’d only just begun to imagine. If I got a scholarship, I could come back to this place. Never had I wanted something so desperately. Is it possible to pray without having been conscious of the prayer?
I got a scholarship.
• • •
Marilyn, Pete, Josette, my best friend from kindergarten, Jill, and my grandfather, on his scooter, all came to my high school graduation in 1994. Dee flew out especially for it, staying with us on the boat. Marilyn took a thousand pictures; I still have one of them. We’re all in it—my grandfather, Pete in his driving cap, Josette, Marilyn, Dee, Jill, and me. It sits in a cheap, wooden frame in my study, next to a picture of my husband and me in college and a tiny portrait of Marilyn. I remember when those graduation pictures first came back from Sav-On, all I could think of was how ugly I was, chubby cheeked and fat in my gown, my long hair a straggly mess. But now when I look at the picture, all I see is a happy girl and the people she loved, all of them overjoyed for her and proud.
• • •
That summer after graduation, I got saved at a Harvest Crusade at Anaheim Stadium. Marilyn and I went down to the outfield with the people who wanted to be saved, thousands upon thousands of them. The stadium lights dimmed. A pastor prayed over the loudspeaker, telling us to repeat after him. He told us to really, really mean what we said; I really, really meant it.
During those few months before I left for college, I was closer to Marilyn than I ever would be again. We went to services at Calvary Chapel, perused Christian bookstores together for dorm room décor and clever T-shirts, studied the Bible. I took on the political and moral beliefs that, according to the radio and our pastors, were the sine qua non of being Christian. I was going to save myself for marriage; I opposed the “homosexual lifestyle;” I hated “big government” and Planned Parenthood. In spite of the beauty and truth I’d once found in the theory of evolution and the scientific evidence supporting it, I convinced myself that God had made zebras and flagellates the same week he’d made Adam. I believed that every single word of the Bible was God’s Word and that there was no interpretation of those words besides what other fundamentalist Christians approved. I was willing to defend these opinions and beliefs to anyone who would listen—Jill, shocked friends from high school, strangers in the public bathroom. I took these beliefs on suddenly, like magic, not because I’d necessarily thought them through, but simply because I believed I was a Christian, and I believed that Christians had to believe those things.
I thought my life had changed that summer, and I was right—but I am a different person now. The politics, the black-and-white judgments, the homophobia, the fundamentalism, the guilt, the fear that unbelievers would go to hell—all of that would eventually fall away like dead skin, like scales on eyelids, except for a faith in God through Christ, except for an abiding love and hope. But that summer, that summer before I left her, I was everything I thought Marilyn wanted me to be.