I entered into high school as into a limbo, no sudden making over there as I’d hoped, no stepping out of the darkness I’d fallen into, merely a sort of perpetual furtive waiting without promise or purpose. The school, a citadel of pink brick amidst the old stone and clapboard homes of Talbot West, seemed a labyrinth after St. Michael’s, with its wings and outbuildings, its dizzying symmetry, its unfixed world, the thousand nameless faces that moved unconnected through its dozen halls. I had dreams of wandering lost in it, of being late for some crucial test and then discovering it was in a language I couldn’t decipher, all senseless hieroglyphs and scrawls.
What friendships I’d had at St. Michael’s seemed to fall away. It was the disconnectedness I couldn’t bear, being with people yet having nothing to say to them, not finding the simplest word that was true, exposed to them then in their uncertain threat. There were the other Italians at the school, the shadowy self-contained world they formed, Domenic and his friends from St. Michael’s, others from Our Blessed Virgin, lingering in their groups in the high-ceilinged gloom of the technical wing. But with them it was the same, whatever relationship I had with them through the various Italian gatherings over the years seeming somehow suspended at school, only the dark nod of recognition if we passed each other and then we moved on. I began to search out circuitous routes from class to class to avoid the groups that formed outside classroom doorways between periods; I took to sitting alone during lunch. In the minutes then that I sat in hunched silence over my meal the cafeteria took on a painful clarity, every sound and image magnified, the clatter of plates, the bright flash of a dress or blouse, the dull, excruciating monotone of conversation; and then afterwards there was the great dead stretch of time to fill before the next period. I took to closing myself in a cubicle in the washroom to await the bell, sat staring at its scratched walls trying to blot out my thoughts, be nothing, not wanting the time I spent there, the shame of it, to be part of any memory of myself. Groups of boys would filter in, joking, mock-wrestling, thin slices of them flickering past the door slits.
“That kid must be a regular,” one said once, and stooped suddenly as if to look under my door.
Then two boys from one of my classes began to be friendly with me, sitting beside me one day at lunch, seeming to pick me out in the room like some project they’d decided to take on. But in the aloneness I’d retreated into by then my first response was only a resistance at their intrusion, at having to work now to present some acceptable version of myself.
“It must get kind of lonely sitting by yourself every day.”
“It’s all right I guess.”
Already they seemed diminished somehow, coming to me when my humiliation lay so plain on me; and each persistence in them, their seeking me out between classes, their coming over every day now at lunch, seemed to diminish them further. There was an innocence to them that made me feel I had to protect them from me somehow, to hide at all costs who I was, how I saw them. This was true especially of one of them, Terry, with his blind too-insistent good nature, his corny humour like a family sitcom’s, his body bulging girlishly at his thighs to give him a slightly ridiculous air. The other, Mark, stylishly long-haired and slender and tall, was more canny, bland and unblemished like some new thing still fresh from its wrappings but seeming able to shift to fit in with whomever he was with as if he had quietly, undetectably willed his normalcy into being; and there was something familiar in this that made me feel sometimes that I was merely his deformed underside, capable perhaps of some simple transformation that would make me as flawless as he was, as inconspicuous.
The two of them formed part of a group called the One Way Challenge. I went along with them to one of the meetings, had got the sense from their explanations of a social club of some sort but then had to grope as the meeting unfolded to find what focus held it together, the oddly private revelations, the oblique, sudden references to religion and Christ. Four or five people spoke in turn, volunteering themselves at once tentative and sure, a girl who talked about the death of her father, a boy who’d spent two years in reform school. The last to speak, an older boy, his neck mottled with blood-coloured blotches like hickeys, spoke about a group he’d belonged to when he’d lived up north.
“We used to get drunk or stoned and then sit around in a circle staring at a candle. After a while you’d forget about everything except the flame, that’s all you’d have in your mind, and the feeling would get so strong you couldn’t take your eyes away even if you wanted to. I guess it shows how powerful Satan can be when you let yourself be taken in by him.”
But in each case the stories were told in tones so plain and matter-of-fact and the group was so staid in its response, so quietly accepting, that I thought I’d misunderstood them, couldn’t reconcile their easy explaining away with what seemed the cryptic underside of things that had been revealed in them, what one might imagine existing but never actually being talked about or lived through.
Within a few weeks I’d begun to attend these meetings regularly. It was never clear to me what had drawn me into them, perhaps the uncertain allure of those first stories I’d heard, the hope of crossing over into their strange, familiar territory, perhaps simply the petty fear of not going along with Terry and Mark, of losing them, of having nothing else to fill the blank space my life seemed then. But even when the meetings had become predictable, suspect, the testimonials and their inevitable conclusion, the acceptance of Christ, even when the rebellion at this bright, forced certainty had grown large in me, still something brought me back to them. It struck me how wilful and hard-won religion seemed in these meetings, how transforming, wasn’t merely a given as it had always been in my life, pervasive and unquestioned as air – I felt something truthful in this, defiant, the group of us seeming hidden away in our upstairs classroom like early Christians in the catacombs.
Yet outside these meetings Terry and Mark seldom spoke about them, neither according them a special prominence nor disowning them, neither different than they were during them nor the same; and with the others, too, there seemed this balancing, this secret they carried within them and yet nothing about them betraying it, the way they looked or dressed, the other friends they had. I wanted their faith to mark them in some way, to charm their lives or simply make them outcast, anything that would test them, couldn’t reconcile this mundane ordinariness with their other, altered selves. Yet the marvel of it was how they seemed to live within this contradiction without tension, as if all the while merely feigning their normalcy, going out into the world as though part of some slow, quiet infiltration. Even Mark, who often hung out with some of the more popular boys, matching their rowdiness then with his own, could still move from that other self with perfect equilibrium into the complicit intimacy of our meetings, silent but then suddenly adding some comment or story, his doubts, his small confirmations, that conformed exactly to those of the others.
“I didn’t want to go but something inside me said I should, and that was the day I accepted Christ. After I thought it must have been the Holy Spirit that made me go.”
For my part I never spoke a word at these meetings, couldn’t find the place in me from which to enter into them, into the past tense of the struggles they charted; I was too far from these struggles or too close, had never believed enough or never been free enough from belief to feel it bursting on me in its newness. Yet I continued in my silent acquiescence, not feeling I had the right to reject the redemption being offered, what Terry and Mark after all had seen the need of in me when they’d picked me out sitting alone in my lunch-time desertion.
I began to attend bible classes at the New Testament Church, Terry and Mark coming by for me Monday nights in an older friend’s dusty Polara. The church sat a mile or so beyond St. Michael’s on Highway 3, modern and spare like an auditorium, inside it blond wooden benches tiered down toward a kind of dais or stage that held only a simple lectern. Off the church was a small-windowed meeting room where our classes were held, in the same spare style, low couches and armchairs grouped round a coffee table as in a living room but the walls completely unadorned, the sense there of a pure, generic comfort, without eccentricity or waste.
We were led by a man named Tom, thirtyish perhaps, blue-jeaned and loose-shirted but always immaculately trim, with the burnished energetic air of a television host. Each week we went over a few passages from the bible, Tom strangely literal in the interpretations he offered of them, seeming to see in them some simple code like a rule book we could follow. He read us an article once by a man who’d escaped from the Soviet Union, how hard it had been to begin to believe in God when he’d been taught all his life that God didn’t exist; but I was struck by the awesome freedom of that, of being without belief through no fault of your own, by the possibility, the monstrous hope, that the opposite might be true, belief itself no more than a learned thing, a lingering habit of mind.
Then early in March a Billy Graham crusade came to the church. Terry and Mark and their friend came by to collect me, the church nearly full when we arrived, with an air of casual expectation as before a performance. The service got on with little fanfare, a hymn and then someone from the church introduced the night’s speaker, a smallish man in a black suit and white shirt, spindly like a caricature, his body tapering up to the high, black fullness of his hair.
“It’s good to hear those raised voices.” But he seemed genuinely pleased with us. “I want to know you’re enjoying yourselves tonight.”
He eased into his sermon, his voice carrying us with its gravelly resonance, bearing down from its first slow casualness toward a hard urgency as he circled various subjects, probing them strangely worldly and undogmatic; and then the subtle swerving, almost undetectable, into religion and Christ. At the end the choir struck up “Lamb of Jesus” and several other men came out onto the dais, taking places on either side of the minister; and finally people in the pews began to file down to them. The action seemed so orderly, so premeditated, that it took me a moment to understand what was happening, that they’d been converted: I felt I’d missed something, some crucial instant in the evening’s comfortable sobriety that had given rise to this outpouring of sudden faith.
The minister was talking above the music, inviting people to come down, a cordial exhortation.
“Don’t be shy, there’s room enough for all of you.”
The friend who’d driven us to the service slipped past me suddenly to join the line. I was aware of Terry and Mark beside me, their careful unpressuring composure, their expectation: this was the moment they’d chosen for me, what the past months had been the prelude to, yet all I felt now was the familiar sundering in me, felt desperate with my failure even while I wanted to cling to whatever it was that made me different from the those who’d joined the line. But then suddenly I was there among them: I seemed to have stepped out of myself, saw myself standing there amidst the others as if my body had moved of its own strange accord. An usher directed me to a grey-haired man at the end of the dais, sombre and dark-suited and heavy-set; in an odd monotone he asked if I accepted Christ as my personal saviour.
I would say the words only, test to see if saying them made them true.
But there was no breaking open of the heavens, no sudden flash of glorious light.
Afterwards I felt hollowed out by my lie, had the sense there was nothing constant in me that held me together. For a few weeks I continued attending my meetings and classes but then began to make excuses, and gradually the first blithe, enigmatic pleasure that Mark and Terry had shown at what I’d done gave way to an awkwardness, one that seemed to have less to do with my lie than with some sudden understanding of what we were to each other, of our simple failure, after all, to become friends. Perhaps from the start that was all they’d been offering me, all I had wanted, the hardest thing exactly in being so precarious and small.
For a time, though, Terry continued to invite me to various church functions, hayrides and singalongs, a Saturday barbecue, a Sunday picnic; and I went along, even beyond the end of the school year and into the summer, still resisting and acquiescing, still distantly hopeful of fitting in. What always struck me about these gatherings was the normalcy of them, the complex, ordinary humanness that stretched out like a web just beneath their bright surface, the prankishness between boys and girls, the conversations about school or sports or cars, the jokes and the horseplay; and it seemed at bottom that what joined people together was not their belief but something deeper, both more and less important, exactly this casual mundaneity they moved through so unthinkingly. In the end what I feared was not the religion, the testimonials and the prayers, familiar rituals by now, safe in their illusion of unanimity, but the empty moments between when I had only myself to fall back on, waiting silent in line to receive a hot dog off the grill from one of the grown-ups, sitting alone in darkening light on some stranger’s lawn with a paper plate in my lap to catch the relish that spilled from the end of my bun. It was these most usual things that seemed furthest from me, that people had barbecues at all, conversations, back yards, that they took so much for granted; and perhaps what I most wished for finally was not the transcendence of belief but simply to feel at home in this strangeness, this ordinariness.