Chapter 8  

Live Nativity

I called my mother from my dorm room, J-307, and she answered in a breathy Southern lilt. When she heard me on the line her voice jumped an octave. Somewhere in the world my heart still pumped blood into my body. I had not been snatched away by some malevolent man while walking home from the library at midnight. The world had not yet swept me into its trap. She breathed my nickname, Tootie, the only name my family has ever called me, and the sheer pleasure in her voice got the old anxiety machine going in my brain, so loudly I could hardly hear her over the panicked whine of its motor.

I could almost see my mother there in the tiny living room of my parents’ new rental house deep in the woods. She’d be straightening her shoulders and putting down the broom, shushing my bellowing father, winding the tangled phone line through the screen door to the porch, where she could have some privacy. She’d push the cats off the worn-down wicker loveseat that overlooked that expanse of farmland, and brush the willow leaves from the cushion.

She barraged me with questions and I answered brightly, at first, leaving out the grimier details of my life, smoothing over the pieces that didn’t fit the story I wanted to tell her. I told her I was having fun with my friends, but didn’t tell her how I’d been up until 4 a.m. the night before chugging down syrupy vodka-based concoctions with the homeless kid from Brooklyn who was squatting in the double room across the hall. I told her I was meeting nice people, but didn’t elaborate about my current campaign to seduce the skater-punk waitress at Packard’s sports bar. I told her my courses were going well, but I didn’t tell her I’d been sleeping through my 10 a.m. classes and my papers were already weeks late. She asked me how the food was, and I hedged. I told her I couldn’t afford a meal plan, not on the ten hours a week that I was allocated through the work-study program.

She asked me if I had enough money and I hedged again. My job at the library kept me in cigarettes and Bethany was generous with booze, but every week I racked up more and more debt at the campus store. My mother didn’t ask about my schoolwork, so I didn’t tell her about the classes I’d picked at random—Feminist Fictions, Anthropological Approaches to Popular Culture, Ever Since Darwin, and Human Memory—or my latest obsessions, the cart-wheeling philosophy of Julia Kristeva and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Instead, when it was my turn to talk I asked the same open-air questions that she’d asked, “How’s the family? How’s work?” She told me that my uncle’s latest attempt to quit drinking seemed to have stuck, though my father tried to talk him out of it, telling him life was too short to cut out what makes you happiest. “That man!” she sighed.

My mother told me how she’d gone back to work for the first time in eighteen years, manning the phones at Catholic Charities and helping the social workers rustle up resources for people who couldn’t make it from payday to payday. She said my dad was hurting for work. He’d only had a handful of jobs since the beginning of winter, so they needed to come up with a plan.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We always do.” I perched on my bed and lit another cigarette. “Here’s your dad.”

My father coughed and cleared his throat, answering in monosyllables as I ran through my usual series of questions. If we’d been sitting on the porch drinking coffee together he’d be full of stories, but he tended to clam up on the phone. I tried to think of something to amuse him and ended up recounting the plot of the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

“Is that right,” he said flatly, and a minute later my mother got back on the phone. She told me how the landlord had gotten into it with Dad about the old cars that had been put out to pasture in the backyard. And now it looked like my dad’s truck would join them soon—the engine was probably shot. She said the dog had gotten caught in a fox trap and had a limp for a while but now he was his old self again.

“What else?” she mused. “We don’t see too much of your brother Obere. He spends all his time with his new girlfriend. But Lord knows I can’t talk to your father about that.” Underneath her flippant tone I heard a certain octave that told me there was another story she wasn’t telling.

I asked about my brothers and my mother told me about Joshua’s antics. I asked about my dad’s health. I asked about Obere and Sam and my mother’s voice finally lowered. Obere wasn’t doing great. When he did come home, all he and Dad did was fight. And she had caught Sam with marijuana again—peeled back a poster on his wall and found a full-sized plant stuck in a hole in the wall. Last weekend, he and my father had come to blows, and my mother had called the police because it didn’t look like either one was going to back down.

I felt my mind freeze up. My mother checked to make sure I was still on the phone. “Just thinking,” I said. I tugged my window open with my hand and felt the frigid air pour into the room, raising goose bumps on my arms. A moment later the question came, forcibly light: “When are you coming home?”

“Soon,” I said. “I’ll be home soon.” The holiday break was a few weeks away and a boy who had a crush on a friend of mine had promised me a ride back to Maryland.

“Let me pray for you,” my mother said. I said okay. Her voice steeled up a bit, and she asked God to protect me and walk with me. I didn’t close my eyes, just tucked the receiver against my ear and looked out the window. A laughing couple threw snowballs at each other in the quad. When I finally hung up the phone, longing and shame tightened around my stomach like a belt. I thought of something my father had told me last summer. Apparently he’d walked into the kitchen to make himself a plate of something and he found my mother crying near the sink. She was crying over me and my future, as she had before and would again. She could only guess at what made up my life, far away in New England, but she knew it wasn’t the life she would have chosen for me. My father could be tender when he needed to be and he said he had calmed her down, poured her a glass of iced tea. When she was feeling better he asked her what she thought I’d do when I finished school. He said she fixed him with those ice-blue eyes of hers and said, “Well, I guess she’ll come home and be one of us again.”

The college I had chosen was only thirty years old and seemed more like a campground than a college. The handful of buildings that littered the campus had been molded out of thick slabs of concrete in a dense, brutalist style. There was no consistency to the curriculum—instead each professor offered classes on his or her special area of interest to a small handful of students. Most of the professors were aging socialists who had first joined the faculty in the seventies, when the revolution seemed imminent. Many of them were grandparents now, but they still showed up for the peace marches in the town square and coached every new group of freshmen through divestment proceedings and other acts of civil disobedience. I had never seen a protest before and was surprised to find that the mood of the student body seemed to rise and fall in response to events whole oceans away, in Israel and Palestine and West Africa, places I only knew from books. While I worked my shift at the campus library I watched the students waving signs and banners and chanting in the quad outside. I was amazed at their fervor. Who were they talking to, exactly? No one seemed to be paying attention.

That first year of college was the first time I really noticed that metallic coil of anxiety buried deep in my belly. Much later I would realize it had been there all along, from that morning I went to school for the first time in a too-big navy-blue cardigan sweater and white socks that bagged around my skinny ankles, climbing carefully onto the school bus with my Snoopy lunchbox in one hand and my shiny green backpack in the other. My mother waved nervously from the sidewalk with baby Sam in her arms as Obere stomped in the leaves near the curb.

Everything I encountered that day was a shock, from the brusque tone of the bus driver to the industrial smell of the shiny linoleum in the hallway to the baggy T-shirts the other girls wore with pictures of cartoon characters I didn’t recognize. At recess I avoided the packs of other kids and stayed close to my teacher’s skirt, and when the bus pulled up beside our small white A-frame house that afternoon I couldn’t get into my mother’s arms fast enough. It had been such a shock to venture outside the tight confines of our house and find another world there, one with a different set of rules. Every day I had to leave that house where everything happened and go wait for a bus to come and scoop me up and take me away. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay in that warm house with my mother and father and brothers for the rest of my life.

Both back then and now I felt so untethered. I had thought I’d had a grip on things, but it turned out I didn’t know anything at all. I had never been so free in my life as I was in college, but now that freedom seemed so large and dark and hollow that it made me dizzy. The sheer weight of all that possibility thrummed in my head and made my stomach seize up. I tried to mother myself, chasing after health and wholeness like a dog chases a cat. Every night I wrote out a series of ambitious resolutions in my spiral-bound notebook. From now on I’d wake up at six every morning and walk over to the rec center to log thirty minutes on the treadmill. I’d take the bus to the supermarket and stock up on oatmeal and bagels and carrot sticks. I’d reserve a carrel on the third floor of the library and spend my evenings and weekends there, catching up on my assignments and getting ahead on my reading. I’d start calling my parents every Sunday and send Joshua a postcard once a week.

It was so clear to me what needed to be done, but after a while I stopped kidding myself. Things always went the same way despite my efforts. I stayed up all night reading some pulpy novel and then slept for most of the morning, and when I woke up I made instant coffee instead of eating breakfast. As the days got shorter and colder I withdrew from my friends and spent long nights curled up under my comforter in my dorm room, chain-smoking. Sometimes I’d sift through the old family photos I’d taken from my father’s scrapbooks.

My favorite hours of the week were the ones I spent in my feminist literature class, gathered around a long blondwood table discussing Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison, and Jeanette Winterson. I already owned most of the novels the professor assigned, but I’d never talked to anyone else about them. Our professor was a thin woman with a shock of coarse, gray hair who looked more like a midwife or a farmer than a professor. She had a long series of Ivy League degrees to her credit, but she encouraged us to call her by her first name, Jane. Unlike my teachers in high school, she seemed genuinely intrigued by her students. She urged us to draw on our own experiences in class discussions and the short essays we wrote in response to the books she assigned. Just before the holiday break, I wrote a long essay about my mother in response to a book we’d read by Doris Lessing. The piece revolved around my conflicted response to her piety and the guilt I felt about leaving my faith and my family behind me. A few days later, when we gathered in Emily Dickinson Hall around that long seminar table, my professor read a few of the essays out loud, mine among them. My classmates listened attentively and appreciatively, but I felt unsettled. It felt so strange to sit among my classmates and hear my family being conjured up in Jane’s patrician accent, pinned into stark relief and frozen under the gaze of a room full of eighteen-year-olds.

A few days later in office hours, Jane smiled at me as if I was a rare specimen of bird. She told me that she didn’t see many students who had made the leap that I had, who had been brave enough to trade in their old worldview for a new one. She said she was proud of me for my courage and wanted to hear more about my mother, my father, my brothers, and my hometown. I found myself offering up their stories—telling Jane how my mother had a college degree and used to be a vice president at a small research company. But when she got pregnant with me she quit her job and stayed home. Jane’s eyes glowed as I talked, and I started to feel uncomfortable, like I was betraying some confidence. But she urged me on. I told her about growing up in the church, marching next to my brothers at the March for Life, watching my mother testify against the presence of witches in the public school curriculum.

Finally I told Jane that I had to go—I was late for my shift at the library. I was already halfway out the door when she called my name and asked me what I was planning to do after graduation. I knew then that I only had to say the word and she’d take me under her wing. I could tell her I wanted to be a writer, and she’d spell out the mysterious algorithms that led to agents and book contracts. I could tell her I wanted to study literature, and she’d pile up my arms with academic journals and books by obscure theorists. I could tell her I didn’t know yet, and she’d tell me to come back for office hours next week and we’d talk about it more. Instead an obstinate spirit rose up within me, and I found myself breezily saying that I hadn’t really thought about it. I told her I’d probably move back home, get married, and have some kids. I don’t know why I said it. Probably just to see her face flush with indignation.

A few weeks later, in my end-of-term course evaluation, Jane praised my writing, saying that the portrait of my mother conveyed a dire sense of doom, an inevitable feeling that what had been passed on to me, I would no doubt pass on to my own children. I was confused by that last line, so I dug through a stack of papers on my desk until I found the essay she’d been talking about. I perched on my bed and read it one more time. Now that I was looking for it, I could see what she meant. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but there was an ominous feeling somewhere between the lines.

I caught a ride back to Maryland with a second-year student who lived on the next hall over, a tall, arrogant guy named Corey with a permanent smirk and a small scar on his cheekbone. I curled up in the back seat and tried to sleep against the window while in the front seat Corey and his friend Ben argued about politics. Just outside Baltimore I woke up to find Ben driving far below the speed limit. When I peered out the window all I saw was a curtain of snowflakes. Ben and Corey sat on the edge of their seats, squinting into the flurry as the wipers did their best to keep the snow at bay. As it got darker and colder, more and more cars pulled over on the highway in an attempt to wait out the storm. We talked it through but decided to push on. After all, my father was waiting for us at a gas station off Suitland Parkway and there was no way of getting through to him to tell him we’d be even later than we were already.

Just before the exit for Baltimore, the car skidded on black ice, and the momentum sent us into a tailspin. The car spun around in a full circle, finally coming to a stop sideways across the highway. For a moment we were all speechless, motionless, and then finally Ben shook himself off and steered the car the right way around. No one said what we were all thinking—how differently things could have gone if there had been another car behind us.

By the time we reached the gas station, my father had been waiting for hours. My heart leapt when I spotted his rusty pickup truck idling near the phone booth. He put his arm around me and shook hands with Corey and Ben, wincing and shaking his head at the story of our near miss, then he hoisted my suitcase into the back of the truck and bun-geed a tarp around it to protect it from the snow. On the long road back home I told him all about my friends and my classes, breathlessly trying to give him a sense of what life was like in college. When I finally stopped talking he nodded in that way of his and kept his eyes on the road.

After an hour or so we hit Calvert County. I craned my neck around to catch all of those familiar signs as they sailed past us in the dark. Adam’s Rib, Buehler’s Market, Dorsey Auto Sales, even the Walmart. When my father turned left at the four-way light on Ball Road, where our old church glowed like a lantern up on the hill, he pointed out a new sign on the corner. It had been a few years now since the scandal had hit Rock Church, when Bishop Gimenez had admitted to an affair with a younger woman. Once the news came out, Pastor Jim changed the name of the church, and one of the elders borrowed a bulldozer and hauled away the big white rock that had stood for years like a sentinel on that steep hill.

I asked my father if he’d ever been back and he shook his head, saying that it had felt like the Lord had removed his blessing from the congregation. After the scandal, Pastor Jim had become vindictive and angry, and one day my father walked out and never returned. Now he and my mother went to a Baptist church on the northern end of the county.

A few miles east of the church my father turned onto an unmarked, pitted dirt road and slowed to an idle to put the truck into four-wheel drive. The truck tunneled through a half mile of dark woods, and then the trees suddenly opened up into a vast expanse of snow-covered farmland. My father followed the faint divots in the rutted-out driveway, through the fields toward a three-acre swatch of rich bottomland on top of a hill. My family had moved just after I left for college, and my father told me that on the other side of the hill, you could follow a trail for a half mile and get to the cliffs that cut the land off from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It was well past two in the morning when we climbed out of the truck, but my mother was wide-awake, waiting for us on the wide porch of the small white farmhouse. She offered to heat up a plate of roast chicken and I shook my head, collapsing onto the couch and pulling my wet sneakers off. She picked them up and laid them out on some old newspaper in front of the heating duct, so they’d be dry by morning.

The next day we all gathered around the kitchen table and held hands while my father said a blessing. In the few months that I’d been gone Obere had bulked up and sprouted a beard, and Sam was nearly the height of my father. Only Joshua seemed the same. He was six years old now, blond and quick to laugh. It took us less than ten minutes to tear through the breakfast my father made—scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a heaping pile of bacon, and white toast dripping with butter and grape jelly—but we sat around the table for another hour or so, telling stories. Our favorite ones were about my father. We laughed ourselves into near-seizures recounting the time my father broke a wooden spoon on my brother’s thigh, the time my father slept in a tent for two weeks before letting his anger drop and speaking to us again, the time he kicked me out of his pickup truck after an early morning argument about the nature of free will, leaving me to make my way to a gas station to call my mother to pick me up.

My father smiled ruefully as he listened to us talk, shaking his head as if reminded of the behavior of a long-forgotten uncle prone to half-baked stunts. He was older now. From my mother’s phone calls I knew his rage hadn’t completely disappeared, but his body no longer supported it—the words that stung when they came from a black-bearded, suntanned man lost their power when they came out of this man’s mouth. My mother was relieved when we ran out of stories and shooed us out of the kitchen so she could start baking.

Late in the afternoon Joshua and I borrowed my father’s truck to make one last run to Walmart for last-minute presents. We got a crockpot for my mother and finally decided on a hummingbird feeder for my father and some DVDs for Obere and Sam. On our way back home we passed the live nativity on the hill on the corner of Route 4 and Ball Road, in front of our old church. As we waited for the light to turn green I honked my horn and Joshua rolled down his window and waved. Mary and Joseph and the wise men waved back enthusiastically and one of the angels twirled.

I told Joshua about the time when we were the ones up on that hill. My mother wore a maroon bathrobe and thermal underwear, I had angel wings strapped over my winter coat, and Obere and Sam wore makeshift shepherds’ cloaks that my mother had made by cutting holes in army blankets. Joshua was a baby then and he lay in the manger with two sleepers on underneath a puffy yellow coat. A few single men from the church had been cajoled into becoming wise men for a night. My mother had coached them in their wardrobe, recommending purple and red, and brought them paper crowns and some of my costume jewelry. One of them still smoked—the Holy Ghost had not yet released him from his old habits. Two of the men submitted to their crowns and drew the line at the jewelry, but the smoker had pierced his ear long ago and had been delighted to find a gold hoop in the jewelry box. My father had his doubts, but their consensus was that the earring looked Middle Eastern.

I remembered it as if it had happened that morning. When my father set up the generator and plugged the lights in, Obere had slid down the hill and scurried across the street, shouting for us to turn a little to the left. When he ran back up, breathless, he reported that we all gleamed against the darkness, and you couldn’t tell my mother was wearing a bathrobe. So we were ready. At first my mother arranged us carefully, encircling the cradle where Joshua had been propped up on pillows. The tight formation lasted about a half an hour, after which Joshua needed to be nursed and things fell apart. My brothers, being shepherds, were allowed to tear around the hill, as long as they didn’t get close to the edge. My father got into a civil argument about infant baptism with one of the wise men. I waited expectedly in my angel outfit, watching the cars zip south. The soft light of twilight faded into something deeper. The air was cold enough for snow, but it held off. Approaching cars slowed, sometimes honking, and we would all cheer and smile, even my father. At that time I imagined the cars held people just like us, mothers singing Christmas songs to keep their broods happy. Their problems would be our kind of problems—not enough money for the gas bill, a stolen toy, an unexpected curse from the father. But now I knew better. Not many families had been like us.

From his perch next to me on the bench seat of the truck, Joshua shook me out of my reverie, asking for more stories about the old days. I obliged him, dredging up memories about long-lost pets and various misadventures, and he looked contented. He barely remembered the days when we were all together, under the same roof, sharing a home, a God, and a vocabulary. It seemed like we had lost that now, and there was no path back to the time when threads of belief stitched our family together at the seams.

After dinner my family bundled up in sweaters and scarves to go to the Christmas Eve service at their new Baptist church in Prince Frederick. When my mother asked me to come I shook my head and kept my eyes on my magazine, afraid to look up and see the disappointment in her face. She probably thought I was going to sneak out to meet my cousins at Boyle’s Tavern for spiked cider. That was true, but that wasn’t the whole story.

I knew how those Christmas Eve services went. First the old hymns with their strangely affecting lyrics, then one of the deacons’ wives singing her heart out to some jazzed up Christmas carol, then the children’s pageant with all those kids in halos and wings, and then a sermon carefully designed to open up your heart and probe its innermost recesses. And then they’d pass out the candles and the lights would dim, and there would be one last hymn. One of the slow ones that always brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t think I could get through the service, even though part of me wanted to join my family in a back pew. I was afraid those old hymns would tug open my doubt like a pulled stitch.