EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
BY Emily Holmes
She kept her nicest things in the bedroom closet. Two dresses for formal events; a pea coat with gold buttons; a short row of sensible high heels. I wiggled my feet into them and clomped across wooden floors, giggling, my toes jammed against the front, a lace shower curtain wrapped around my body in imitation of a wedding officiated by my brother (or sometimes a doll) and in which I married my stuffed animals.
She’d grab a pair of pumps each week and fit them into her book bag, already weighed down by my Sunday shoes and my brother’s Sunday shoes and a Bible and a hairbrush and lipstick and maybe a sweater, and the three of us walked to church in our sneakers. The pedestrian bridge wasn’t built yet and so, at the end of Third Street, my mother held our hands to scramble down the short bank with its narrow trail worn in by decades of feet.
We jumped the creek, or she tossed us across when it was high. When I leaped, I always hoped I would land on solid earth and not another squishy in-between place obscured by grass growing over water because skin is waterproof but decorum was not. Over the years, each of us took our turn falling in.
It was entirely unnecessary from a logistical standpoint. We lived in the middle of a town and we owned a car. My grandparents did not jump the creek to get to church. Had my father attended church, I’m fairly certain he would have walked around the long way. I eventually asked my mother why, and she said, because it’s fun, which was true.
She left her bag in the quiet back hallway of the church before stepping, red-lipped and two inches taller, to the podium with her Bible and her notes, ready to read and sing and invite the ten or twelve people in attendance to pray, and I sat there, too, but didn’t include myself in their head count except as an anxious body apologetically breathing the same holy air as the believers. I knew I wasn’t doing it right, and it wasn’t just because of mud specks on my socks.
Until recently, it did not occur to me to find out if my mother’s church has a position concerning gay people, because there are so many other reasons to not be there. A surface-level search revealed the official stance to be no stance, but I also found several articles, published and distributed by the Christian Science Church around the same year as my birth, that discuss the potential for, and necessity of, healing homosexuality. Their message is couched in language pretending at nonjudgement – banishing the sin and not the sinner, that sort of thing – and reminds readers that healing one’s soul is a life’s work. More recent writings assert all are welcome, all are equal, all are loved. I know that taking no position is still a position. I am reminded of a Bible story about false prophets being as wolves among sheep, or maybe it was the shepherds who were selling something too good to be true and wolves and sheep carry no blame.
Until recently, it did not occur to me that my mother might have her own position concerning gay people, but I cannot Google search what my mother believes and so I continue not finding out.
Last week I crossed the creek over a short walking bridge, no jumping. My back was to the church building when my dog halted to thrust her head beneath bushes that smelled vaguely like skunk and I briefly turned to look at the faded siding and six or eight cars in the parking lot. My mother teaches Sunday school now – a sweet little girl, she told me, five years old. We look at pictures in kids’ books about Abraham and Isaac, you remember those? – and I heard nostalgia. Usually, I try not to walk down on the end of Third Street.
I keep my nicest things in my entryway closet. They are leather, rubber, metal, wool. I take my things to another worship, into the service of becoming lost and dirty among shadowed valleys, high meadows, still waters. My love is not in Sunday school picture books but it tastes like new Junegrass and feels like prairie wind in autumn. My feet are big enough to borrow my mom’s shoes, but I don’t wear heels.