Day 4
But eventually I figured that Cynthia was legal age and she surely knew what she wanted to do. While I found it shocking I could see the type of money she was pulling down. It made my wages from the Seaside seem pitiful when once I’d felt like it was big money.
When you’ve never had any money even the smallest salary seems like riches beyond compare. While we’d been growing up we’d never been allowed more than the occasional quarter or dime, and even then we were told that only worldly sinful little girls and boys spent those coins, that we were to be righteous and save them. We dutifully deposited those small coins in our piggy banks.
Momma and Daddy must have realized how ill equipped to handle finances that all of us leaving home were because each of us was sat down, given a certain sum of money to help get established in our college life and subjected to a lecture on finance. My first few months of freedom I had to send home a ledger sheet and receipts showing how I was spending my money. My parents relaxed this after they realized I was not blowing it on stupid stuff. With my later siblings leaving for school they dropped it down to just the lecture before leaving and the strict warning that they would not bail out anyone living unrighteous.
My parents eventually did find out that Cynthia and I weren’t exactly living model Quiverful lives in my senior year of college. First, I’d lied outright to my parents, telling them that I needed to stay at Southern Mississippi Christian College to get an Advanced Midwife Certification. They still didn’t know that I’d changed schools and was studying the sinful in their eyes major of psychology. I was actually doing some practicum at the local mental health clinic during my senior year.
I remember how easily the lie about the advanced certification slipped from my lips and how I felt entirely justified. Through my psych classes I’d come to understand how brainwashed and manipulated all the children in the family had been. It was the very reason I wasn’t even concerned with Cynthia’s nearly naked job. I figured she was in a rebellion against how’d we’d been raised and who it was expected we would become.
How we were found out occurred just by chance, the tumblers on the locks of the universe lining up exactly right. First Southern Mississippi Christian College sent a letter home to my parents asking if I or Cyn ever intended to take up my studies in midwifery with them again because they were discontinuing that major. They wanted to know if they needed to transfer our records.
The second thing that happened was that our older brother Jake, had left Liberty University without his degree the month before after being caught with another male student in a sexual tryst on campus. Jake didn’t go home, Jake headed straight to Biloxi and took a job on a local fishing boat. It was a fishing boat that fished for the type of ocean fish that ended up in cat food. One of the big employers in Biloxi was a cat food cannery and we joked that when the winds blew right you could smell the Meow Mix.
Jake slept on our sofa and the three of us settled into a comfortable routine. During that month I put some of my beginner psych skills to the test and listened to him agonize over his failures to live up to Momma and Daddy’s strict standards. I was able to interject enough times that the way we’d been raised wasn’t exactly right to start to make Jake realize that who he was inside was something he could not help. It was just him, not his fault, nothing to feel guilty over.
We could have continued living and working and going to school like that for another year but at the same time that Southern Mississippi Christian University sent our parents a notice about the program so did Liberty University sent Jake’s official expulsion letter home as well. The expulsion letter explained in great detail why Jake had been thrown out the month before and as soon as it arrived at the house Momma and Daddy somehow figured out that Jake had gone south to Biloxi rather than home to Pennsylvania.
Before we knew it they were on our doorstep.
When they knocked on our apartment door I’d thought it was a neighbor, not my parents. We lived in a funky rundown old hotel converted to small one bedroom apartments. The hotel had been considered fancy and luxurious around the turn of the century,. hosting presidents and Hollywood royalty but now it was peeling sun faded paint and Victorian architecture overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.
We were all home, Cynthia was sleeping before her casino shift and I was between classes and my shift at the Seaside while Jake was showering off the stink of the fishing boat. I had on my usual summer time uniform of shorts, t shirt and flip flops and sat at our tiny kitchen table having my nails painted a vivid fuchsia by Roberta from next door. Roberta had once been a ‘Robert’ but was now three years post op from sexual reassignment surgery and she talked to me a lot after discovering I was studying to a psychologist. I had asked her everything I could think of about her life, her childhood and how she’d come to make this decision. I don’t know who Robert was but I did know that Roberta was loving, genuine and gentle person, one of my many friends in this town.
Looking back at that day I can see us at the table, radio on blaring classic rock and roll with Roberta applying swift coats of nail polish, her own long fingers gripping the polish brush and darting in and out of the polish bottle like a delicate dance, wielding the brush gracefully. I remember admiring her graceful ways and feeling gawky and clumsy next to her femininity.
The knock came and I across slowly, carefully, so I wouldn’t smear the polish and twisting the front door knob open slowly due to my wet nails. My parents stood on the doorstep radiating a cold fury. I remember feeling very afraid seeing my father’s nostrils flare and the red in my mother’s face, the red misery indicating she’d cried a great deal.
They came into the room like they owned it and I was helpless to do anything but back into the room away from them, in disbelief that they were here. My father glared at Roberta and she sputtered out apologies, picking up manicure supplies before leaving herself.
What ensued was a terrible scene in which Cynthia and I were labeled whores by our father for dressing with so much skin showing. The truth came out, that Cynthia was an exotic dancer at the casino, I was studying to be a psychologist and that Jake had moved in with us to start working on a fishing boat. Our parents raged, called us names and demanded we all return to the fold, give up our sinful ways and return home. My father informed both Cynthia and I that we were betrothed to men he’d picked out for us so we should pack our bags and get ready to leave. They told Jake that to them he was now dead, that there was no forgiveness for fornicating homosexuals, only shunning and damnation.
When you’ve never had any money even the smallest salary seems like riches beyond compare. While we’d been growing up we’d never been allowed more than the occasional quarter or dime, and even then we were told that only worldly sinful little girls and boys spent those coins, that we were to be righteous and save them. We dutifully deposited those small coins in our piggy banks.
Momma and Daddy must have realized how ill equipped to handle finances that all of us leaving home were because each of us was sat down, given a certain sum of money to help get established in our college life and subjected to a lecture on finance. My first few months of freedom I had to send home a ledger sheet and receipts showing how I was spending my money. My parents relaxed this after they realized I was not blowing it on stupid stuff. With my later siblings leaving for school they dropped it down to just the lecture before leaving and the strict warning that they would not bail out anyone living unrighteous.
My parents eventually did find out that Cynthia and I weren’t exactly living model Quiverful lives in my senior year of college. First, I’d lied outright to my parents, telling them that I needed to stay at Southern Mississippi Christian College to get an Advanced Midwife Certification. They still didn’t know that I’d changed schools and was studying the sinful in their eyes major of psychology. I was actually doing some practicum at the local mental health clinic during my senior year.
I remember how easily the lie about the advanced certification slipped from my lips and how I felt entirely justified. Through my psych classes I’d come to understand how brainwashed and manipulated all the children in the family had been. It was the very reason I wasn’t even concerned with Cynthia’s nearly naked job. I figured she was in a rebellion against how’d we’d been raised and who it was expected we would become.
How we were found out occurred just by chance, the tumblers on the locks of the universe lining up exactly right. First Southern Mississippi Christian College sent a letter home to my parents asking if I or Cyn ever intended to take up my studies in midwifery with them again because they were discontinuing that major. They wanted to know if they needed to transfer our records.
The second thing that happened was that our older brother Jake, had left Liberty University without his degree the month before after being caught with another male student in a sexual tryst on campus. Jake didn’t go home, Jake headed straight to Biloxi and took a job on a local fishing boat. It was a fishing boat that fished for the type of ocean fish that ended up in cat food. One of the big employers in Biloxi was a cat food cannery and we joked that when the winds blew right you could smell the Meow Mix.
Jake slept on our sofa and the three of us settled into a comfortable routine. During that month I put some of my beginner psych skills to the test and listened to him agonize over his failures to live up to Momma and Daddy’s strict standards. I was able to interject enough times that the way we’d been raised wasn’t exactly right to start to make Jake realize that who he was inside was something he could not help. It was just him, not his fault, nothing to feel guilty over.
We could have continued living and working and going to school like that for another year but at the same time that Southern Mississippi Christian University sent our parents a notice about the program so did Liberty University sent Jake’s official expulsion letter home as well. The expulsion letter explained in great detail why Jake had been thrown out the month before and as soon as it arrived at the house Momma and Daddy somehow figured out that Jake had gone south to Biloxi rather than home to Pennsylvania.
Before we knew it they were on our doorstep.
When they knocked on our apartment door I’d thought it was a neighbor, not my parents. We lived in a funky rundown old hotel converted to small one bedroom apartments. The hotel had been considered fancy and luxurious around the turn of the century,. hosting presidents and Hollywood royalty but now it was peeling sun faded paint and Victorian architecture overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.
We were all home, Cynthia was sleeping before her casino shift and I was between classes and my shift at the Seaside while Jake was showering off the stink of the fishing boat. I had on my usual summer time uniform of shorts, t shirt and flip flops and sat at our tiny kitchen table having my nails painted a vivid fuchsia by Roberta from next door. Roberta had once been a ‘Robert’ but was now three years post op from sexual reassignment surgery and she talked to me a lot after discovering I was studying to a psychologist. I had asked her everything I could think of about her life, her childhood and how she’d come to make this decision. I don’t know who Robert was but I did know that Roberta was loving, genuine and gentle person, one of my many friends in this town.
Looking back at that day I can see us at the table, radio on blaring classic rock and roll with Roberta applying swift coats of nail polish, her own long fingers gripping the polish brush and darting in and out of the polish bottle like a delicate dance, wielding the brush gracefully. I remember admiring her graceful ways and feeling gawky and clumsy next to her femininity.
The knock came and I across slowly, carefully, so I wouldn’t smear the polish and twisting the front door knob open slowly due to my wet nails. My parents stood on the doorstep radiating a cold fury. I remember feeling very afraid seeing my father’s nostrils flare and the red in my mother’s face, the red misery indicating she’d cried a great deal.
They came into the room like they owned it and I was helpless to do anything but back into the room away from them, in disbelief that they were here. My father glared at Roberta and she sputtered out apologies, picking up manicure supplies before leaving herself.
What ensued was a terrible scene in which Cynthia and I were labeled whores by our father for dressing with so much skin showing. The truth came out, that Cynthia was an exotic dancer at the casino, I was studying to be a psychologist and that Jake had moved in with us to start working on a fishing boat. Our parents raged, called us names and demanded we all return to the fold, give up our sinful ways and return home. My father informed both Cynthia and I that we were betrothed to men he’d picked out for us so we should pack our bags and get ready to leave. They told Jake that to them he was now dead, that there was no forgiveness for fornicating homosexuals, only shunning and damnation.
posted by Blues In The Night | 9:26 AM
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