The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [52]
A nasty discussion ensued, with Laurie challenging Miriam about her apparent unwillingness to let others speak and to leave her old group behind. Now, Miriam had given no indication that she was living in the past or planning on remaking her old group routine in the new church or anything like that—she was just telling a story about the way things had been in her old church. But Laurie wouldn’t leave it be.
“You’ve got to leave all that behind, honey,” she said. “You’ve got to let go. I have to say, if you’re going to be a cell leader, I’m concerned that you’re bringing this negative attitude to it.”
“I am not,” snapped Miriam.
“This is good tea,” I whispered to Janine.
“Yes, it is,” she whispered back.
“I’m just saying, you can’t be bringing that negativity into your group,” said Laurie. “Now, let me tell you how it’s done in our group…”
Eventually Miriam got up in a huff and walked away for a moment, and the table fell silent. Laurie, still pounding a mound of battered crab legs—her fourth plate—was in an advanced state of anxiety. You could almost see the waves of fright emanating from her. She needed desperately to engage somebody about something, but there was no place for her to put all of her energy. The table was deathly silent for a moment except for the sounds of purposeful, joyless munching. I smiled at Laurie, then listened as Murray suddenly mentioned something about not being able to eat any cake, because they only had chocolate cake and he didn’t like chocolate.
“Well,” I said, “there’s flan up there, if you like that.”
Laurie exploded in laughter.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Flan!” she chuckled. “Oh, you’re cute, honey, you really are. ‘Flan.’ It’s pronounced flaaahn, sweet thing.”
I was pronouncing it “flan,” like “fan”—correctly, it seemed to me.
“Actually, no,” I said. “It’s flan, like fan.”
“Oh, sweet baby, I don’t mean to step on your toes,” she said, “but you’re wrong. It’s flaaaaahhhn,” she said, giving me a long hoity-toity a, like the a in “wand.” “It’s from the Spanish.”
I bit my lip.
“Actually, it’s not Spanish, it’s—never mind,” I said. “You’re right.”
I jabbed violently at a piece of phony kung pao chicken.
“You’re not offended, are you, honey?” Laurie said.
“No,” I whispered. “I’m fine.”
Actually, I wasn’t fine. I sat there for a moment in silence, trying desperately to get a grip on myself. I was losing control of my cover.
The rest of the lunch followed a similar pattern. There were several more disagreements over minor doctrinal questions. I had begun to understand that the whole business of being this kind of Christian is mainly wrapped up in a tireless study of various dos and don’ts—how to get through the day and interact with other human beings without slipping and inviting a demon into one’s home or one’s abdomen. That meant you had to know everything there is to know about all of the don’ts; with idol worship, for instance, you had to spend lots of time discussing with your Christian friends what constituted idol worship and how to avoid it. A great many conversations will therefore be held in situations like this about the relative permissibility of things like crucifixes and portraits of the dead and plastic Virgin Mary statues. At this lunch, Murray opined that the Catholics were obviously idol worshippers because of their worship of the Virgin. Laurie chimed in that the rosary, too, was a kind of idol worship. A range of idol candidates was then discussed in succession.
After a while you begin to realize that there is no such thing as traveling through life quickly in this world. With demons lurking in even the most harmless-seeming transactions, every outing ends up getting bogged down in these anxious procedural discussions. It can get pretty bleak.
Finally the check came. We calculated that each person owed exactly ten dollars, not including the tip. The couple Miriam and Murray gave exactly twenty-one dollars. Laurie kept trying to say that the tip had been added to the bill automatically,