Excerpt: Putting the Damage On

Sunday morning, and the Buick pulls into the Montessori parking lot. It’s near the beginning of the school year and the weather is changing flavors from Red Delicious to Golden Delicious. My tights are a little itchy, but all I do is scratch the back of my thigh absently with nails bitten neatly down to my fingertips. The car stops, and Dad engages the emergency brake with a ripping creak. My little sister opens her door first and exits, her pink and white polka dot dress looking crisp and her white hard-soled shoes coming down on the black asphalt neatly. I scramble across the seat to exit the car on her side, snagging my tights on an unraveling upholstery seam, and slam the door closed as carefully as I can. Mom, Dad, Melissa, and I are almost to the sidewalk when I look over at my sister and notice she’s carrying her Precious Moments Bible in her right hand. I have to go back to the car; I’ve left my Bible sitting on the floorboard.

I find my Bible and my spiral-bound notebook with my name erased into the cover in block letters and once again take care with the heavy Buick door. Dad had scolded Melissa once for slamming the door so hard that he was sure the rolled-down window would shatter inside the door frame. My sister, however, had already skipped off into her friend’s house, and I was left in the backseat to take her rebuke by proxy.

I pull the door of the Montessori center open, set my Bible and notebook down on a wood-toned folding banquet table, and make my way to the stack of gunmetal folding chairs my father was helping to pull from a closet. With a chair under each arm, more like crutches than like wings, I join my sister in helping to set up the room. We unfold the chairs in straight rows facing a tall podium and a rolling cart supporting a bulky overhead projector. Other families arrive and fall into their Sunday set-up routines. I watch my mother stir Cremora into a small Styrofoam cup full of freshly percolated coffee. Mom’s coffee is always sweet and creamy, like Werther’s candies. Mom’s lipstick leaves a pretty, proprietary rose-colored semicircle of lip shape on the pure white Styrofoam. I know that when she’s finished drinking the entire cup of coffee, there will still only be that one perfect lipstick stain on the rim of the cup. She’ll drink from the same spot on the cup for the entire first service.

Kim Allen, the pastor’s only daughter in a family of seven children, starts playing the piano and that’s everyone’s cue to take their seats. Melissa and I sit down near the front, away from our parents. The first thing we do at church is Sing the Kids’ Songs. I’m a little older than most of the kids there; I’m ten, and not quite ready to be in the Teens class. But I’m a big fan of the songs. They’re full of action and humor, and I love to sing. I am in my element as I jump up off my chair with all the other kids, pantomiming the stand-up, sit-down slapstick of “And if the devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack--OUCH!”

After the songs , the pastor welcomes the congregants. The welcome the short, bolo-tied Texan gives is perfunctory and mostly directed to the forty or fifty regulars; we rarely have visitors to our church. As he goes over the announcements and prayer requests, I inhale the grapey scent of the mimeographed church bulletins and start playing with words in my head. If the devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on attack, I think, imagining the devil on a leash like a Doberman Pinscher, being given the command to Sic ‘em! and instead folding into a neat sit position, his stubby tail wagging on the ground to the exasperation of his master. If the devil dozen like a tea-can, sit on attack. Our glass sun-tea pitcher comes to mind, and I wonder if this would qualify as a tea-can for the twelve demons. Probably not. If the devil doesn’t lie, Katie can sit on attack. I play with the implications. The devil always lies, so Katie’s bottom is safe. I wish there was a Katie at church, so I could sing this to her. Would my friend Catina’s name work? If the devil doesn’t like Catina’s zit, don a tag. I’ll tell her this after class, and she’ll think I’m weird, and that will give me a strange sense of satisfaction. With the word "don" fresh in my mind, my mind wanders to Christmas carols, starting with “Don we now our gay apparel.” My attention span is broken, however, as I realize most of the other kids have been dismissed and are heading towards the classrooms for Sunday School. I grab my Bible and notebook and join them.

Today’s Sunday school is taught by Jerry Chappell. The kids in my class are all upper-elementary school age, and most of us sit awkwardly in the stunted preschool-sized chairs. Mr. Chappell sits on a regular folding chair, the kind that stands in for pews in the main room of the Montessori. The room is large and divided by an accordion curtain that runs along a track and can be clicked into place. Today, the curtain is just pulled, not fastened, and so I can hear the younger kids in their class starting in on their reading of Ecclesiastes 3. The Byrds song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” starts playing in my head, and I imagine what their class would be like if I were teaching it. I’d definitely sing them the song first, then play the Byrds’ version, then maybe go into a discussion of opposites.

Mr. Chappell wastes no time. “Today, we’re talking about God’s First-John-One-Nine Promise,” he begins. First John 1:9 is one of the favorite verses of our church, one that is referred to every Sunday, in every sermon. “Lara, will you read us the verse?” Lara Lloyd is one of the really poor kids at the church. She has four siblings, and they all dress in colorless thrift-store bargains and sport ragged home haircuts. When her father, who often leads the Kids’ Songs in a loud, froggy voice, teaches Sunday school, he always makes sure to let all the kids know that their family don’t have a television set. He makes it sound like a choice borne of righteousness, but we all know it’s because they can’t afford one. Lara wears thick glasses and, like her siblings, is limited when it comes to social skills. I waver between shy and showoff myself, and I am in a completely different league from Lara’s hereditary adenoidal awkwardness.

I quickly flip to 1 John 1:9. I have known the order of all sixty-six books of the bible since I was about six. I find the verse and have read the entire paragraph silently by the time Lara has stabbed the verse with her finger on her own Bible. She reads painfully, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Mr. Chappell smiles, but his thick, brown mustache disguises any happiness he might want to express and instead spreads across his face like a sinister hot stain.

“This verse starts with the word ’If’,” he begins, “which is what is known as a conditional. ’If’ means that there are two possible outcomes: one that depends on meeting the conditions that the ’If’ sets up, and one that results from not meeting that condition. The condition in this case is the confession of sins. ’If we confess our sins,’” he says, and stops. He looks at each of us. “Jenny, what happens if we confess our sins?” Jenny Metcalf looks at the table nervously. She has patchy bald spots on her head from where she twirls her hair in her sleep and pulls it out. Her mother says that she twirls her hair because she misses her daddy when he’s out to sea, but Mr. Metcalf is mean. He is skinny and pale and stubbly and he has mean eyes. I have a hard time imagining anyone missing him.

“Umm…” Jenny stammers and lets it trail off. She doesn’t want to answer, and she doesn’t want everyone looking at her. Her face is bright red. I raise my hand and Mr. Chappell calls on me. I have the verse memorized, so I don’t even have to read it to answer, “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I say it like I say grace, like something I have repeated for as long as I can remember, like rattling off my phone number or birthday. Knowing these verses is a part of who I am, and who I have always been, and I‘m proud of the way the big words flow out of me like they were easy words, controlled and letter-perfect.

“Right,” says Mr. Chappell. “And what happens if those conditions are NOT met?”

I haven’t thought about this. I always confess my sins. I have been taught that God can’t stand to look at sin, and therefore can’t stand to look at me if I have unconfessed sin in my heart. I know I’m smarter than the Catholics, who stupidly believe that you have to have a relationship with a middleman to talk to God; I know with certainty that I can talk to God all by myself. Every time I pray, which is before every meal, at bedtime, at many regular intervals on Sundays at church, and at random times during the day, I prepare to talk to God by confessing my sins quickly. Most of my sins consist of thinking unkind thoughts about my little sister, except for my one big secret sin that I try not to think about.

Now it’s my turn to be silent for a second as I stare at my ragged fingernails. I know that you can’t take Communion with unconfessed sin in your heart or you will face dire judgment from Jesus himself. Communion is a time to be pure with your relationship with God, and the pastor always gives the congregation the same grave warning to forego Communion if you think you might have any unconfessed sin, or the penalties meted by an angry God would be soul-shattering and permanent. My mind always raced before Communion, to review my week and be sure that I had accounted for every sin. I found that personally, it helped to confess sins as generally as possible, even though from sermons past I knew this was a frowned-upon legalistic approach fit only for Pharisees.

I only get this far in my thoughts before Mr. Chappell decides to give us all the answer. “If you don’t confess your sins, and you die,” he begins, “and don’t forget that you can die at any moment. You could be hit by a school bus tomorrow, and what happens if you have unconfessed sin in your heart and you’re called up to Judgment?” We’re all very quiet. Mr. Chappell leans forward, his elbows on his knees, his ice-blue eyes fixing on each of ours in turn. “You may be saved. You may have accepted Jesus into your heart, your name may be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and you may think you are ready for Heaven. But.” He leans forward even more, and his voice is low and slow and sober. “Any unconfessed sin you have will be written in the Book of Judgement, and it’s going to play like a movie in front of everyone you know. And I’m gonna see it. And Pastor’s gonna see it. And your mom and dad are gonna see it. And everyone is gonna see it.”

I am petrified, because I have a secret, one that I barely admit to myself and certainly don’t understand. It’s a secret I know is wrong, and one that will destroy my family. It’s a secret I will never confess.