Homecoming

The church bell was struck by lightning last night. A large black streak now blemishes the old bronze, and Pastor Kyle is asking for donations to replace it. My aunt reposted what he put on Facebook, and I stared at it for a long time this morning, feeling a strange sense of loss. My guts were tight, tied in intricate knots.

I hate coming home for Christmas. I avoided it for several years, opting to spend Christmas Eve instead at rooftop bars—warmed with alcohol and bodies—and the subsequent holy day nursing a nuclear hangover.

But this year, I turn thirty on December 26th, and I suppose I should spend another milestone birthday with my parents. They’ve been with me for the rest of them.

They’ve already brought up the time I asked my mother if I’d been born on the same day as the devil.

I was turning ten, to be fair to my poor child logic.

My mother had stared at me, wide-eyed and slackjawed. She’d been icing my homemade birthday cake for the next day, but she forgot about it in the wake of my nonsensical question. “Why would you say something like that?” she had chided.

“Jesus was born on the 25th, so the devil should have been born on the 26th ‘cause the devil’s Jesus’ little brother,” I had said. This had made as much sense to me as the sky being blue. It was an innate thing I knew even though nobody had told me to believe it.

My mother had scrunched her nose at me and then hid a laugh behind her hand. She had recovered quickly, suppressing a smile. “Nobody knows the devil’s birthday,” she had said. “Nobody but God Himself. So no, you weren’t born on the devil’s birthday. Now don’t ask me any more stupid questions. I’m concentratin’ on dinner.”

I wonder if my mother ever thinks about that conversation. Does she believe I was born with the devil? Does she believe the devil had been born sometime in June? If I had to pick a birthday for Satan, I think I’d pick June 6th. 6/6.

I’m only missing one other six.

My mom is still deeply religious. She goes to church every Sunday in a conservative dress that always cuts off below the knee, and she always goes out with Carol and Winona to The Porch Swing for lunch after Pastor Kyle finishes his sermon promptly at eleven o’clock.

Years have passed since I have been to church, but the first thing I’d heard riding into town was the church bell: loud and studious like a Catholic nun.

My mom had been in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead. The radio was so low I could barely hear it, and while the bell had rung seven times, the vague sound of yesterday’s hits had been overwhelmed.

I remember being ushered out of bed by my mother every Sunday at eight in the morning. I was expected to shower, dry my hair, eat breakfast, and then dress. When I turned sixteen, minimal makeup had been added to my Sunday morning itinerary: foundation, concealer, blush, clear mascara, and lipstick that nearly matched the shade of my lips.

Nothing too gaudy. Just enough to show me off as prime real estate. I was a good Christian girl, and I would become a good Christian wife in the time it took to finish my degree at the small university forty-five minutes north. But I had other plans.

By seventeen, it had become clear to me that I was not good Christian wife material. I had tried to be: saying nighttime prayers, reading my King James Bible, and feeling the Holy Spirit when we sang hymns that sounded like a very monotone cat giving birth.

I knew love then or a slice of it, carved finely from your smile and our brushed fingers in the dark of the movie theater. When we were kids, we spent hours at the community pool, swallowing mouthfuls of chemically-treated water and arguing over who was the more powerful mermaid. You always smelled like sun and chlorine after, the heady sweet fragrance of summer.

As we grew older, we morphed from kids to clay models ready for shaping. Or perhaps we always had been the latter but the extent of external manipulation had not yet become so clear.

I was the first one to get a boyfriend. His name was Emmanuel, and he was a quiet tall kid with gangly limbs like a newborn gazelle. He rarely spoke, but he insisted we pray before we opened our lunchboxes, and he always wore color-coordinated outfits. I thought back then my parents would be proud that I had found a man so pious.

My father was unnerved by my dating at fourteen. My mother said, “Don’t you see, John? This is wonderful. God has called Emmanuel to lead Maggie. He has Christ in his heart, that’s for darn sure.”

For a year, Emmanuel and I held hands before and after Sunday school—never during. You and I still talked, but now I had to split my time between my future husband and you. You, who couldn’t bring yourself to date anyone. I tried to point out guys for you: Josh, Ethan, Seth.

You said no, no, and no.

I said that you had to settle on someone eventually.

You said that you didn’t want to. All the guys here were gross. Josh picked his nose and ate the booger at fifteen years old, Ethan had already kissed Sarah Wheeler and Sarah Heath, and Seth was a fag because he let his little sister paint his fingernails.

I told you not to say that word.

So you yelled it to the sky, God, and everybody. Thankfully, the park was empty that day save for Kevin McClarthy who was laying under a tree with his headphones and a grass-stained Nirvana T-shirt on.

It was New Year’s Eve when we kissed. We were outside in your backyard behind the oak tree your dad had been saying he wanted to cut down for years.

The velvet black of the sky lit up with fireworks, their colors kaleidoscopic for a shivering moment. The winter wind was icy and sharp, cutting the old year from our skin and making room for a new growth. We shared a scarf. I had broken up with Emmanuel because he and his family had moved to Utah at the end of our sophomore year.

We started hanging out more again, and the summer leading into our junior year, we found ourselves experimenting with makeup and golfing at the country club with our dads on Saturdays and stealing donuts from the senior Bible study that met right before the ten o’clock traditional service in the sanctuary.

We started biking to the community pool again like when we were in fifth grade. You had bought a new swimsuit in secret when you had visited your cousins in Dallas; it was a cherry red two-piece with a triangle top and a cheeky bottom. You had grown breasts recently—it seemed as if they had sprouted out of nowhere—and I couldn’t stop staring at them. When you came up out of the water after diving into the deep end, droplets glittered on them like tears.

I had worn my plain black one-piece. When I had looked at myself in the mirror after our swim, I’d realized I looked childish. Chest flat and boardlike, figure square and chubby around the middle. When am I gonna become a woman? I had asked myself. I pictured you with your breasts and your smile freshly straightened from braces that had come off just before school let out for the summer. You had always been prettier than me, always adored by teachers and parents alike. To be honest, I couldn’t tell if I was jealous of you or if I wanted to kiss you.

Something had happened between us. A divide had shuttered us off to each other and now even with Emmanuel gone, I felt it shimmering between us. I wanted to feel the warmth of your sunbaked skin again. I wanted to hold your body against mine. I wanted to tear your stupid tits off. The violence of my own desire scared me.

On New Year’s Eve with fireworks exploding under God’s watchful eyes, I turned to you, and you turned to me. Your eyes were dark, reflecting sparks like still lakewater. Your lips were chapped and pale. Your hair was stringy; you had forgotten to put in dry shampoo this morning. You had never been more beautiful to me, and I drew you in and kissed you.

You never left our small town. You ended up marrying Seth and having two children before twenty-five.

I saw you at the grocery store on December 23rd, pushing a little boy in your cart. Your oldest, a little girl with wispy brown hair (a mirror of you), was drinking a juice box and lollygagging behind you as she stared at the cereal boxes.

I forgot how to breathe. You looked like a mother and a good Christian wife. You wore flared jeans and a pink blouse. I remembered how we used to make fun of anyone at school who loved the color pink.

That big green monster reared its head, roaring for justice. It wanted to rewind the clock and stay here with you. You couldn’t afford community college because after your parents sent you to a “Christian summer camp,” your grades went from solid A’s and B’s to low C’s. It tanked your GPA, and you would have had to pay for college yourself. It was a miracle your parents didn’t kick you out.

The green monster gave way to a neutral acceptance, a realization. Marrying Seth was your last act of rebellion, wasn’t it? The fag who painted his fingernails. Maybe he was transgender or bisexual. Maybe he was just straight and liked spending time with his younger sister.

Either way, the lump in my throat was impossible to talk around. I ducked out of the store before you saw me, resolving to get my mother AA batteries at the gas station along the highway.

When my parents found out that I had kissed you that year, they did the strangest thing. They glanced at each other after your father told them, and my dad told yours, “Thank you for telling us. We want to have a private conversation with our daughter now.”

They ushered him out the door and then came back to the living room where I sat, trembling, pale as a corpse. They stared at me for an excruciatingly long time, and then my mother said, “We’ve known for a while, Maggie.”

I said, “What?”

My mother said, “When you were eight, we gave you a Barbie doll. It was a holiday Barbie, really expensive, but the first thing you did was take her gorgeous dress off.”

My father pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed quietly. “We couldn’t figure out why you would do that,” he said, “and then you found Emmanuel.”

I raised an eyebrow, no longer frightened. They weren’t angry with me.

“What does Emmanuel have to do with this?”

My mother said, “That boy was gayer than the day was long.”

Oh, I thought. No wonder his hands were never sweaty when I held them.

Both of my parents dissolved in giggles then. I watched them, wondering if they were laughing at me. I couldn’t get the image of you out of my head: wrapped in a black scarf, your nose Rudolph bright. I hadn’t seen you since that day, and that had been a week ago. I would see you at school in a few days. Everything would be all right because we were together.

Your father forbade you from talking to me at school, and you listened.

My parents told me being gay was a sin and that your father was right to protect you from me. When I told them I was born gay, they said I had been. That my gayness was the will of God but also a divine punishment because they’d had premarital intercourse. They were not angry with me, simply resigned to their fate.

I had laughed, unable to comprehend the absurdity of it all.

God never sins. He only punishes the sinners He made in His own image.

You and I haven’t talked in more than ten years. I don’t know why I’m writing this letter. I’m probably going to just shred it. My parents still have a paper shredder that works, can you believe that?

I hope you kicked your brother’s ass for catching us that New Year’s Eve. I hope you know I see your chapped lips every time I kiss another woman. I suppose then, in a very theatrical way, you were the lightning to my church bell. I am forever branded because of you, and I will never know if I marked you the same way.