The Nowhere Girls(13)
She knows the thought is wrong as she’s thinking it, but she wishes, just once, a guy would try to take advantage of her.
*
If Erin DeLillo tolerated figures of speech, one might say she could do her homework with her eyes closed. Literally, of course, this is not true, but she does her homework quickly and with ease, even AP Calculus and AP Chemistry. Mom always reminds her how lucky she is to be so bright; few Aspies are so exceptional, so special. As if they need to be. As if that’s the only way to be forgiven for the rest of what they are.
She sits on the couch with Spot and a snack of carrot sticks and homemade raw cashew “cheese” spread, having earned today’s episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Episode 118, “Cause and Effect,” starts with the senior crew playing poker. Data is particularly good at poker because his face shows no emotion. He has no tells. His poker face is permanent.
Erin has been working on her poker face. She doesn’t cry as much in public anymore. She’s gotten better at hiding when she’s hurt. The worst of the bullies have mostly gotten bored with her and moved on to other unfortunate victims. But there are still the looks when she says something weird, the snickers when she trips or does something clumsy, the ignoring, the exclusions, the talking to her like she’s a child or hard of hearing—and that’s from the nice people.
This is the episode of TNG where the Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop and keeps repeating the same day over and over and over again, and no one knows how to make it stop.
GRACE.
“Prescott, I am honored to meet you!” Grace’s mother says from the pulpit with her arms open wide, as if she’s embracing the entire congregation. She’s got her magic smile on, the one that wrinkles her eyes and makes you feel hugged even if you’re across the room. Grace looks around and sees people smiling, absorbing Mom’s warmth. They feel it—her sincerity, her passion, her love. Just one sentence in, and Mom’s a hit.
Grace remembers when their old church used to look at Mom this way, before she started talking about itchy stuff like social justice and the hypocrisy of conservative Christianity. Even the old curmudgeons who could never quite forgive her for being a woman couldn’t help but be charmed by her infectious warmth. She was a feel-good kind of preacher, the kind that spent a lot of time on Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and the pretty parts of Psalms, talking about God’s love and comfort and grace. The head pastor was the guy who did the fire-and-brimstone sermons; he was the guy who talked about sin. Mom warmed up the crowd with good news so they’d be ready for his bad.
Right now she’s up there telling jokes. Their old church wasn’t into funny. “A teacher asked her students to bring an item to class that represented their religious beliefs,” she says in her thick Kentucky drawl. “A Catholic student brought a crucifix. A Jewish student brought a menorah. A Muslim student brought a prayer rug.” She pauses for comedic effect before delivering the punch line. “The Southern Baptist brought a casserole dish.” Everyone laughs.
“Yes, y’all, I come from a Southern Baptist tradition. My faith evolved, and I moved on. But I still love me a good, cheesy casserole.” Laughter all around.
“We have to be able to laugh at ourselves,” she says. “We must question ourselves, our most firmly held beliefs. We have to evolve and change and become better. The very fact of Jesus, His very existence, shows us that change is necessary, that change is God’s work. Jesus came to change things. He came to make things better. We cannot insult Him by refusing to keep doing His work.”
She never got to talk like this at her old church. “Change” was a dirty word, a sinful word. Their old, white, blue-eyed Jesus was a totally different guy from the one she’s talking about today.
Grace has never heard her mother speak with this much passion, with this much joy. She can feel the electricity buzzing through the congregation. They are hearing her, feeling her. She is reaching inside and touching the parts of them where a little piece of God resides. Grace’s father sits next to her, his phone lying next to him on the pew, recording the sermon. The church makes its own recordings to post on the website, but that won’t go up until tomorrow at the earliest, and he will want to listen to this right away, to make notes, to find pull quotes, to scour Mom’s words for new angles to make her famous. They will sit at the dinner table tonight while Grace finishes the week’s homework, talking late into the night about their two favorite subjects: God and business.
Grace is in the front row, but Mom seems miles away. Grace is just one of many, just a member of her audience, her flock. Grace’s heart aches with yearning. Just look at me, she thinks. Make me special. But it doesn’t happen. Mom is everybody’s, not just Grace’s.
Mom walks back and forth, abandoning the confines of the pulpit, taking up as much space as possible, reveling in this freedom she’s never had before. This church isn’t nearly as big as the megachurch they came from, but it’s still big enough that she has to wear a mic on the collar of her robe. And the congregation is hers in a way she’s never had before. All hers.
As they rise to sing, not out of the hymnal but from a photocopied handout of an old protest song from the sixties, Grace realizes her face is wet. She wipes her eyes and mouths the words of the song without making a sound. There is so much room inside her, so much space to fill. So much emptiness. Even here, she feels it. Even here, where God is supposed to make her whole.