White Oleander - Janet Fitch [28]
6
THE NEXT SUNDAY, I slept too late. If only I hadn’t been dreaming about my mother. It was a sweet dream. We were in Arles, walking down the allée of dark cypress trees, past tombs and wildflowers. She had escaped from prison — she was pushing a lawnmower in front of the building and just walked away. Arles was deep shade and sunshine like honey, Roman ruins and our little pension. If I had not been hungry for that dream, for the sunflowers of Arles, I would have got up when the boys ran off into the wash.
But now I was sitting in the front seat of the Torino. Carolee groaned in the back, she had a hangover from doing drugs all night with her friends. Starr had caught her sleeping too. Amy Grant played on the radio, and Starr sang along, wearing her hair in a sort of messy French twist like Brigitte Bardot, and long dangling earrings. She looked like she was going to a cocktail lounge, and not to the Truth Assembly of Christ.
“I hate this,” my foster sister said in my ear as we followed her mother into church. “I’d kill for some ’ludes.”
The Assembly met in a concrete-block building with linoleum-tiled floors and a high frosted glass window instead of stained. A modern fruitwood cross loomed in front, and a woman with a puffy hairdo played the organ. We sat on white folding chairs, Carolee on my left, face dark with sullenness and headache, Starr on the aisle, glowing with excitement. Her skirt was so short I could see where the dark part of her pantyhose started.
The organ playing crescendoed and a man walked to the lectern wearing a dark suit and tie with shiny black shoes, like a businessman. I thought he would wear a graduation-type robe. His short, side-parted brown hair glistened like cellophane under the colored lights. Now Starr sat very straight, hoping he would notice her.
As he spoke, I was surprised that he had a sort of speech defect. He swallowed his l’s, so it came out “alyive” instead of “alive.” “Though we were dead in our error, He made us alive together in Christ. By the Cross, we have been saved. He lifts us up to the life . . . everlasting.” He raised his hands, lifting us. He was good. He knew when to build and when to let off, and when he got quiet, that’s when he came in for the kill, with big shiny eyes and little flat nose, and a lipless mouth so wide he looked like a Muppet, like his whole head opened and closed when he talked. “Yes, we can live again, even when we are dying of . . . the sin virus.”
Carolee shifted, making her chair squeak on purpose. Starr flapped her hand, nudged me and pointed at the Reverend, as if there was anything else to look at.
Reverend Thomas started telling a story of a young man in the sixties, a good-hearted boy, who thought he could go his own way, as long as he didn’t hurt anyone. “He met a guru who taught him to look for the truth within himself.” The preacher paused and smiled, as if the idea of truth within yourself was absurd, ridiculous, the red light warning of doom. “You are the judge of what is true.” He smiled again, and I began to see that he always paused to smile when he said something he disapproved of. He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he was smashing them.
“Oh, he was by no means alone in his philosophy at the time,” Reverend Thomas continued, his button eyes shining. “‘Do your own thing, man,’ was the wisdom of the day. If there was something you wanted, it was good, because you wanted it. There was no God, no dying. There was only your own pleasure.” He smiled at the word “pleasure,” as if pleasure was hideous, an abomination, and he felt pity for anyone who would be so weak as to value it. “And if anyone spoke of responsibility or consequences, they were held up to ridicule. ‘Lighten up, man. Don’t be square.’
“Yes, the young man had unwittingly contracted the deadly virus. It had infiltrated