Most of my teenage apostasies were minor and covert. Walking through the park a few days after a Fourth of July, I picked up a trammeled paper miniature of an American flag on a toothpick. Rather than drop it as hastily as a hot brick, I wiped the icing off the sharp end and slipped it into my pencil box. (We weren’t meant to own a flag—any flag. I’d have gotten into trouble for possessing the flag of the Kiwanis club.) Later, with an anxious glance over my shoulder, I slipped into a Salvation Army thrift shop (run by another faith) and bought a shirt. When my mother asked where it came from, I improvised that our school had declared open season on unclaimed items in the lost and found. It was just a men’s button-down, but its plaid was subtle, in becoming forest greens and rust, and I loved that shirt. Though the fabric was thin, it warmed me with its mean glow of mutiny.
More than once, I picked up a cigarette butt and smoked its last few shreds of tobacco in secret. I didn’t enjoy the abrasive heat in my lungs, but these infringements were satisfying purely for being infringements. I bought Tic Tacs afterward and drank lots of water; I had a gut feeling that breaking the tobacco taboo was on a more grievous level than the paper flag.
When out of the earshot of our ilk, I dabbled daringly in paganism. I wished an adjacent classmate “good luck” on an upcoming test. She looked at me queerly; I hardly ever said anything. She didn’t understand that my invocation of good fortune had nothing to do with her. I wanted to discover if anything bad would happen to me, and I was experimenting, gingerly, with becoming someone else. Likewise, when I volunteered “Bless you!” after someone sneezed in the cafeteria, I wasn’t obeying a social convention. I was violating one.
I’d be more impressed with myself if these toe-in-the-water dalliances with the dark side were conducted in open view of the folks for whom my humming the first few bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the way home from school would constitute sacrilege. Yes, I was afraid, of course I was. But I was also in training.
After working myself up to it for a month, I finally crossed the line when I was fifteen. The rest of the family had their coats on and were heading for the door—I’d left my personal declaration of independence until the last minute—when I hung back and said I wasn’t going to the meeting. I’d meant to use a strong, uncompromising voice, but my announcement came out as a croak.
My mother barely noticed. “Of course you are,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now get your coat. We’re running late.”
I cleared my throat. “No. I hate meetings. They’re long and monotonous, and I don’t think I . . . I don’t even believe all this stuff! You can’t make me.”
“We can make you, young lady, and we will make you so long as you live in this house.” She shot my father a look of injunction. “John?”
“Come on, honey.” When I refused to budge, he advanced with an expression of weary resignation and took my arm. I yanked it back. Then he grasped my sweater at the back of the neck. I honestly think he was trying to be gentle, but there’s only so gentle you can be with a struggling body of 135 pounds if you’re going to prevail. I didn’t want to hit him, but I also didn’t want to go out that door, and in the end he had to half-carry me, flailing, to the backseat of our secondhand VW Bug at the curb.
When we got back home, I was parked at the kitchen table and forced to copy the week’s Watchtower, because if I was writing it out, I couldn’t simply pretend to read it. My mother reported my insolence to the elders, and I was hauled in for a Judicial Committee Hearing. I braved it out by being sullen and unresponsive, which didn’t help my case. I was officially “marked” for two weeks. While by that point having the rest of the congregation cut me a wide berth was bunny-in-a-briar-patch punishment, being mini-shunned by my own family stung. Instructed to act as if I weren’t there—to pretend that their sister was invisible or, I filled in, dead—my brothers weren’t supposed to talk to me. To my astonishment, they didn’t, not even in surreptitious whispers, and not even when our parents were out in the backyard. As matters turned out, like secreting my miniature American flag, that fortnight of being blanked by my family would also prove good practice—for what would soon become the rest of my life.
It’s sometimes assumed that misfits, weirdos, and outsiders must naturally be drawn to other misfits, weirdos, and outsiders, but nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, oddities avoid one another, the better to prevent contracting an even greater stink, and other oddities appear just as odd to oddities as they do to regular kids. Like their more normative brethren, outliers are attracted to the socially obvious. Fat or homely no-hopers are just as prone as sexpots to develop crushes on the captain of the football team. So why wouldn’t I have already noticed Emory Ruth back in middle school? Everyone else had.
She exhibited a rare social ease that didn’t rely on cruelty. She was good at things. She was the star of our public speaking class, and she never seemed nervous in front of a group; if she dropped her notes or lost her place, she was able to turn the faltering to her advantage with an ad-libbed one-liner. She was even good at stupid things: spinning quarters, snapping her fingers. Significantly, in retrospect, by high school her political instincts were impeccable; that is, she was able to ingratiate herself with our teachers while piping up with just enough smart-assed cracks from the peanut gallery to ensure that she was never spurned as a suck-up—although a gift for being all things to all people ill prepares you for the time you’re obliged to choose sides. Up until a certain juncture, Emory and I never had a serious difference of opinion. I now wonder whether Emory ever seriously disagreed with anybody, whatever they thought. On balance, strong convictions don’t pay off, and I should know.
Yes, she was preternaturally pretty, but my having been smitten from afar by our sophomore year of high school shouldn’t be attributed solely to standard teenage obsession with surfaces. She was also bright, in the days when being quick didn’t constitute a subtle disadvantage (and, later, not so subtle). Yet her easy academic excellence and snappy classroom wisecracks weren’t precisely the source of my fascination, either. By her teens, Emory already exuded an air of what we’d soon call “entitlement,” but she never seemed to be laying claim to a discreet set of tangible rewards that she unreasonably imagined her due. It’s true that her parents earned considerably more money than mine (whose refusal to bring in a decent “worldly” income was all their fault). But Emory’s pervasive sense of superiority seemed unattached to being fetching, clever, or well-off. It was a preexisting condition. That was the real source of my entrancement: Emory’s conviction that she was better than everyone else wasn’t based on anything at all.
Before we go any further, I should put in a word on my own behalf. I worry I’ve cast myself as an ugly-duckling sidekick. Such a crude self-portrait would be wide of the mark. I was a bit odd-looking in high school, and like so many girls I put on a few pounds during puberty. But once I ran away from home and started living with Emory’s family (to get ahead of ourselves here), I was so mortified by imposing on the Ruths’ pantry that before long my figure shrank to the proportions of a waif, so alarming Emory’s mother, Kelly, that she put me on a strict supplementary diet of chocolate-malt protein shakes. Moreover, while we’re often poor judges of ourselves, I wager that neutral parties, and even an invested party like Emory, would bear me out: by my latter teens, a certain ungainly mismatch of features growing at different rates finally settled, and my “interesting face” went from a euphemism for “plain” to understatement. Physically, the alteration in the relationship between my nose, brow, and cheekbones was absurdly slight, but it was socially seismic. Wade always claimed there was something undefinably “exotic” about my looks, which, he would also reluctantly concede, made a good match with the fact that my older two children are half Japanese.
I mention this Cinderella transformation not to brag but because it pertains to my friendship with Emory, which my gradual visual upgrade made not better or worse but more complicated. Granted, I started out something of a charity case—literally so, for two and a half years. And Emory was blithely accustomed to being the most striking female in any given room by the time she was twelve. That uncanny superiority of hers was sufficiently rock-solid that when surprise competition came up from behind, she took the new neck-and-neck in her stride. She was secure enough to recognize that a constant companion who brought more to the table than sheer obstinacy was in her interest; an eye-catching girlfriend gave her a measure more clout. Nevertheless, my no longer being an aesthetic sad sack required a sneaky tweaking of our relationship that I’m not sure she entirely liked.
While we’re at it, however, I’m compelled to inject a less complimentary submission: I’m not very smart. In school, I was hopeless at math. In the sciences, I could memorize the four kinds of rock formation, which was no more demanding than memorizing four different rock groups in music, but anything more complicated lost me at photosynthesis. If mechanical engineering were left to the likes of me, we’d all be crossing rivers by getting wet. Unlike Emory with her effortless high marks, I got decent grades only by applying myself, and even there I was never selected for the advanced classes that Emory was put in. Besides, by the mid-1980s grade inflation was already rife, and the expectations of American high schoolers were knee-high; mostly, you just had to show up. In case I needed to have my self-suspicions quantified, my scores on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT would be mediocre (plainly, I can’t remember the exact scores anymore because it wouldn’t flatter me to remember them). To my knowledge, I’ve never been subjected to the “demeaning ignominy” of an IQ test, but I imagine the results would have been equally average.
Accordingly, in my adulthood the numbers in my check register have never matched my statements, and “balancing” my accounts has entailed scrawling over what I had miscalculated and taking the bank’s word for it. As of 2008, I was left in no doubt that I have no grasp of economics. Despite my having read, glaze-eyed, more than one definition, a “credit default swap” still sounds to me like a card trick.
Between us, then, Emory was the better looking by conventional metrics and the far more outstanding student. From adolescence onward, this much, too, has remained a constant: she has always had an uncanny ability to keep up with changing fashions, and her look is reliably cutting-edge. She wears the hairstyle soon to become all the rage before most people realize the do is in vogue. She leaves the impression that she isn’t following trends but setting them. She’s the sort who knows what new slang means before you’ve even heard the term, and this verbal savvy predated the internet. Although search engines have devalued the knack, in the 1980s picking up hip new lingo that you couldn’t look up in the dictionary wasn’t so much a matter of reading the right magazines (whose vernacular was always dated) as having an instinctive inner ear. On a positively animalistic level, she knows which way the wind is blowing. For me, her riding at the very forefront of many an advancing craze had long made her seem like a real original. I now see Emory’s precocity in a different light. She’s consistently conformist before everyone else.
I’m afraid I conjure our history together with double vision. Though it ill serves our story for me to be mean about her, the burst of spontaneous joy that hit when she first started talking to me in tenth grade has become a cold emotional artifact, an abstraction. From the perspective of the present, I’m inclined to interpret her crossing of a social barrier of sorts in high school as self-interested, even if the benefits I offered were underobvious. Maybe, as the only Witness in our sophomore class, I seemed exotic even before my features settled. Maybe I was just a quirky feather to add to her quiver.
Yet I should clarify that, despite the barbaric reputation of high schoolers, my peers did not exile me. I exiled myself. We were not supposed to mix with non-Witnesses. Throughout my schooling, I’d been subject to any number of approaches for friendship that I rebuffed. (What was the point? I couldn’t come to their houses, nor they to mine.) Emory didn’t stand out as the lone brave soul willing to fraternize with a pariah, but because she was the only classmate whom I couldn’t bring myself to brush off.
Although she wouldn’t pay any price if we were discovered, Emory savored the illicit kick of our whispering sessions at lunch. I’d explained from the get-go that any confederacy on our part violated my religion—though I qualified “my supposed religion,” and she was impressed that I was already mobilizing a resistance of one. She loved the story about my father hauling me to the car by the scruff, and she joined me in ridiculing the picayune prohibitions I grew up with. I showed her the flag in my pencil bag. She learned to recognize my forest-green button-down with the thin rust stripe as the bedraggled rebel uniform in which I faced down my personal Crown Forces by guerrilla means.
The funny thing is, she was drawn to the very quality in me that would eventually prove our undoing. I was born belligerent, and my natural insubordination transcended my rejection of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m not convinced that I have “a problem with authority” altogether, because I don’t preclude the possibility of authorities being in the right. But I don’t bow to authorities when they’re wrong.
I was already a reader (though The Watchtower didn’t count), and I don’t mean that as a boast. For me, sure, reading was about escape, but also about shirking. It was what I did when I was meant to be doing something else. I kept a book open in my lap in class the better to ignore the lessons. Further, because I was aware of not being the sharpest tool in the shed—oh, how I miss those playful metaphors—I didn’t trust myself to accurately infer the meaning of vocabulary from context, the way everyone else seemed to, so I routinely deferred to reference books. In other words, don’t imagine this slight anecdote is a tribute to my education. American public schools were descending into lackluster decay decades before Carswell Dreyfus-Boxford shoved the corruption into overdrive in 2010.
Because I associated books with disobedience, with recalcitrance, with laziness and malingering, I reviled English class. I disliked being told what to read, so any assigned text acquired a taint; that is, I was predisposed to hate it. Having a book imposed on me from above denied me its full possession, while also encroaching on the precious time that I could claim as my own outside school and the Witnesses. Specifically, in tenth grade I hated Silas Marner and Julius Caesar, and I blamed Ms. Townsend for assigning them. I especially bore her a grudge for assigning Lord of the Flies, which I had already read, and which was already mine, and which I was loath to allow her to co-opt and ruin for me. So much for background.
It was just an idle comment as she handed back our papers on Piggy and what he symbolized (my own distanced essay was purposefully flat): “I’m reticent to report that most of these analyses were a little superficial.”
I raised my hand. I hope I haven’t given the wrong impression; I wasn’t that stupid. That is, I was smart enough to know this was stupid.
“Pearson?”
“I think you meant ‘reluctant.’”
“Excuse me?”
“You said, ‘I’m reticent to report.’ That’s a misusage. ‘Reticent’ describes someone keeping their feelings to themselves. You know, keeping your mouth shut.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” I said, holding my nerve. “That’s so. ‘Reluctant’ is about not being eager to do something. You weren’t ‘reticent,’ because you didn’t keep what you felt about our essays to yourself—that they were disappointing.”
“I might add, including yours,” Ms. Townsend said with an edge. “Didn’t your parents raise you to regard correcting your elders as impolite?”
“Only certain elders,” I said obscurely.
“Well, then. Maybe you should learn to be more reticent.”
Touché, I thought. I had taught her the meaning of the word.
I relate this remembered scrap because Emory’s reaction to my impudence was telling. Cutting her eyes nervously at the reprobate in the back row, she looked both horrified and thrilled. She was attracted to my daring, but wary of being associated with it and thus potentially bearing the price of that association; she didn’t smile, shoot me a thumbs-up, or give any other indication that we were socially in league. Later at lunch, she vacillated between the reticence of suppressed censure and reluctant admiration. Emory herself would never be guilty of such gross miscalculation. The small advantage of calling Ms. Townsend on her mistake—a handful of points to be won from fellow pupils—would be far outweighed by the disadvantage of incurring our teacher’s disfavor for the rest of the year. My chastening of Ms. Townsend was self-destructive. But in those days, Emory found watching me fling myself on my own funeral pyre a captivating spectator sport.
Our classmates regarded the pair of us as perplexing, though as I’ve indicated I was more curiosity than outcast. So my peers didn’t quite perceive me as a pity pal, while Emory’s adoption of a benighted Jehovah’s Witness may have made her seem more alluringly complicated. At the start of our friendship, there were indeed elements of utility on both sides. For me, Emory represented access to, and acceptance by, the whole wondrous non-Witness world. In kind, she was fascinated by my gloomy, despotic circumstances, so I also provided her access to another world, which she could sample voyeuristically from a safe distance.
But in short order, honestly? It seemed we simply liked each other. In the longer term, I might express our affections more strongly, but in truth, I don’t remember how I once felt about Emory Ruth—and I mean neither that I refuse to reveal these feelings nor that I’m in the grip of a stubborn denial. I honestly can’t remember. Owing to my borderline dyscalculia, multiple numbers in my checkbook register are heavily overwritten. The raw emotional material of Emory’s and my years together before a certain crossroads is no more available to me than the fragile underlying figures of my arithmetic mistakes. Consider this a warning, then. You can’t trust a rendition of a course of events by any narrator who knows how the story ends.
Word had been out for months that Emory Ruth and Pearson Converse had become, however incongruously, an established duo. Dizzied by the vast social vistas opening before me and fast losing a protective incredulity that I was pulling off a passable imitation of a normal person without being hauled once more before a scalding Judicial Committee Hearing, I lapsed into incaution. There was my life at school, where I was widely perceived as coming out of my shell, and there was my life at home, closed, dark, brittle: the shell I crawled back into. Aside from the occasional mortification of doorstepping a classmate’s parents while my family soldiered the streets trying systematically to ruin a whole neighborhood’s weekend, the two halves of my black-and-white cookie remained discrete.
It was my younger brother, Caleb, who ratted me out. He was enrolled in the adjacent middle school, from which he could easily espy my comings and goings across covered outdoor corridors when both schools changed classes. Not only would he have failed to recognize Emory from our Kingdom Hall, but revealing tops and svelte skirts would have advertised from a hundred feet that she was not one of us.
Ever since my thwarted effort to put my foot down over meetings, I had negotiated my coerced devotions by acting like a robot. I paged the tracts at a metronomic tempo gauged to approximate the time it would have taken to read them. I sat through Family Worship Evening every Wednesday, my back straight, hands folded, body unnaturally still, expression blank. During our evangelical rounds, I marched silently from house to house, lagging the smallest increment behind but never far back enough to be lectured to hurry up. On a mark’s front porch, I no longer caught the householder’s sympathetic eye after the rest of the family had (finally) turned to leave, because I couldn’t afford to break character. At home, I spoke when spoken to, keeping my responses just complete enough that I couldn’t be accused of surliness. See, I didn’t act surly—or detectably brooding, resentful, or obstreperous. I didn’t act anything. I remember that period as strangely fun. Neither my mother nor the ecclesiastical fussbudgets at the Kingdom Hall could catch me out doing anything wrong—or nothing they could put their fingers on. Which drove them wild. I had absented myself. They had no idea what I was thinking, and while they had their suspicions—whatever was going on behind those dead eyes, it couldn’t have been good—they had no proof. Superficially, I was an exemplary Witness. Yet extreme compliance can constitute a form of insolence. This sly gambit especially enrages panjandrums, because disobedience disguised as obedience is impossible to prosecute.
Exposure of my double life brought this appearance of taunting line-toeing to an end.
We were still at the table after another flavorless dinner that spring. I remember I was wearing the crimson silk scarf that Emory had given me for my sixteenth birthday in February. To lower its profile, I kept it tightly knotted, tucking the tails inside my blouse. I’d explained to my mother with strained casualness that the “ratty old thing” had been discarded in a gutter on my route home from school, but at least it was warm and free; by this cool early April, I feigned being prone to a chill. Mother didn’t care for the “wanton” color, but I’d claimed that God had placed the practical garment in my path. To discard it would have been ungrateful.
“Caleb tells me you’re thick as thieves with some harlot at school,” my mother charged.
At the antediluvian argot, I nearly dropped my mask of stony stoicism with an eye roll (although honestly, had she called me a harlot, the archaic smear would have cut me to the quick as fiercely as it would have in 1850). My impulse to mockery was quickly overtaken by the flush of having been discovered. I shot a daggered look at my little brother, who blithely met my eyes with an expression of saintly innocence. I tried to keep my voice uninflected, but it developed a tremble: “I don’t have any friends who exchange sex for money.”
“Honey, don’t nitpick,” my father said. “You know we’ve discouraged you from getting too chummy with people who don’t understand us and aren’t in the Truth.”
“She hasn’t been discouraged,” my mother corrected. “She’s been forbidden.”
“I do everything I’m supposed to, and who my friends are shouldn’t concern you.”
“When your friends are in the grip of Satan, they very much concern us,” my mother said. “Caleb says this girl waltzes about half-naked, and he’s spotted her with a boy putting his hands all over her parts while grappling on the bleachers.”
I couldn’t help wondering who it was. Emory had her pick. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“You’re to cut off all contact with this floozy and keep yourself to yourself,” my mother ordered. “We have to be able to trust you. If you carry on consorting with this silly girl, we’ll have to move you to another school.”
I was already debating whether I could manage to reconnoiter with Emory in locations out of my odious little brother’s sight line, disliking the prospect of demoting my bold alternative persona to that of an ordinary sneak, when my mother upped the ante.
“The alternative, which I far prefer, is to pull you out of school altogether. You’re sixteen now, and according to the law we only begrudgingly honor to keep these dreadful people out of our business, you’re no longer required to keep wasting your time there. It’s much more important for you to get serious and prepare yourself for baptism.”
In that moment, quandary escalated to emergency. Cherished in its own right, Emory’s friendship had also thrown me a lifeline. When you’re trapped, you’re susceptible to shortsightedness; all that matters is getting out. Resolved to escape the Witnesses, I was already wrestling with the reality that this meant escaping my family, too—though I’d yet to grapple with the emotional consequences. Insofar as I had any firm plans, I suppose I’d intended to tolerate the strictures of my parents’ faith until I turned eighteen. As attracted as I was to the secular world, which appeared so much more dazzling glimpsed through the bars of a cage than when viewed by the carelessly unencumbered, I was also afraid of it. I had no idea how to pilot a wide-open future beyond the familiar confines of “our” religion. Any visions of that future were blurred. But of this much I was sure: I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of navigating such an alien landscape, with no support of kith or kin, as a high school dropout.
This may seem surprising, but the second punch of my mother’s one-two hit me harder. Day-to-day, I could forgive myself for going through the motions of adherence to beliefs I’d privately renounced, because I was still a minor, I needed food and shelter, and humoring my parents was the price of survival. But baptism would violate my inmost self. Maybe the Witnesses had made deeper inroads than I liked to admit, but I took the commitment seriously. Too seriously to make it. Crossing my fingers before immersion was not an option.
“But sixteen is the very youngest any Witness gets baptized,” I said. I’d been counting on forestalling this Gethsemane until I could make my getaway as a legal adult. “I don’t know if I’m ready—you know, mature enough.”
“Sure you are, sweetheart,” my father chimed in, thinking he was sticking up for me.
“There’s no such thing as engaging in a righteous act too soon,” my mother said, brisking up from the table and wiping her hands on a dish towel. “I’ll advise the elders that you’re eager to start your studies. As for that flibbertigibbet, when you tell her you’ll have nothing more to do with her, there’s no need to speak face-to-face. You can write her a letter; you can find her family’s address in the phone book. I suggest you make it short.”
Everything moved very fast. Whatever I can or can’t remember feeling, just on the face of it the invitation from the Ruths to come live with their family was a gesture of enormous generosity, and not simply on the part of Emory’s parents but on Emory’s part, too. It’s one thing to share confidences and lunch periods, quite another to share your mother, your father, your sister, and your own bedroom. I may have been particularly horrified by baptism, but it was the threat to the completion of my secondary education that persuaded her parents to make such a drastic offer. We all have religions of sorts. Her father, David, was a history professor, her mother, Kelly, an attorney in contract law, and they revered learning; graduation was their baptism. I’d met them only a few times in passing when they’d picked up their daughter from school for some family outing, but apparently my running buddy had kept them up to speed on her adoption of a woebegone victim of theological zealotry. If I’d become tantamount to one of those African poster kids with cleft palates and flies in their noses whom you send three dollars every month, rare is the checkbook benefactor who asks the benighted urchin to move in.
Although the flurry of hugger-mugger negotiations took only two or three days, that was still long enough for my mother to force me to write that letter to Emory, explaining that she was a bad influence, hoping that she found God lest she be wiped from the earth in the coming battle between Jehovah and worldly government, and announcing that, in the absence of such a blessed conversion, our ill-conceived friendship was at an end. (Despite the admonition to keep it short, my mother was dictating and couldn’t control herself. Witnesses are a prolix people.) Emory duly received that letter in the post after I’d already moved in with her family, and the two of us got it framed. So yellowed by sun that the ballpoint was almost indecipherable, it was still hanging beside her bookcase the last time I was in her apartment, which I’m afraid was some time ago.
On the designated morning, I packed what little would fit in my regular rucksack, the better to not attract attention. I gave my mother an unusual kiss on the cheek and my father a hug whose ferocity and duration he wouldn’t have understood. I left for school. I never came back.
At Kelly’s insistence, I surmounted a paralytic dread and called home that first night. Unfortunately, it was my mother who answered. “Hi, Mother, I didn’t want you to worry. I’m at my friend’s . . . the harlot.”
Dead air.
“Anyway, I’m going to be staying here for a while . . .”
She hung up.
Kelly suggested that maybe once everyone had had a chance to cool off and miss each other, and my parents had been given the opportunity to appreciate how strongly I felt about staying in school . . . I cut my hostess off. I said I was already en route to being disfellowshipped. No one at the Kingdom Hall would be allowed to have anything to do with me. I’d been deleted from my family—worse than dead, more as if I had never been born. But then I pulled up short, worried that this kind woman hadn’t realized the absoluteness with which her daughter’s companion had just been dumped in her lap. “Unless, of course, you want to get rid of me,” I added meekly. “I could always beg the elders for forgiveness and maybe get off with reproof . . .”
Kelly was having none of that. She made up the spare twin bed in Emory’s room. She shushed Emory’s younger sister, Felicity, when the thirteen-year-old assessed my long dun skirt and bunchy gray sweater: “You look like you just walked off the set of Oliver.” While preparing a mac and cheese from scratch, Kelly mentioned quietly that maybe we could go shopping for a few new clothes on the weekend. After dinner, I curled up blissfully with the household’s hardback of The Bonfire of the Vanities, glorying in not having to read The Watchtower. In short order it became a running gag with the Ruths that I was in their “Witness protection program.”