Chapter 2: Susan
After duty, I headed straight to the rectory with a small brass key. The rectory was almost completely painted. The furniture was gathered in the center of the room covered in opaque plastic. The walls had been primed and the first coat was nearly complete. I found Grover’s tools neatly stacked in a corner of the living area. The apartment was perfect for a single man. It had a tiny bedroom with a twin bed and dresser set. The closet was a small walk in completely stuffed with flannel shirts. The living area would be considered a great room if weren’t so cozy. A tiny kitchenette, all the appliances and cabinets covered in plastic, was connected to a television-less living area that had two comfortable chairs, a small sofa, a bookshelf and a tiny breakfast table. I put on one of my old Coast Guard T-shirts while I perused the books on the priest’s shelves, then got to work.
Being in the rectory reminded me of my father. He had left my mother a few years before she died – finally finally jumping head first into the cult that had controlled our lives for so many years. Our refrigerator was divided between meat and dairy, every passover we were to clean the house, throwing out all of the bread and flour and yeast and anything that could even remotely be leavened. My mother was not a member of the cult, but she remained with my father for years as he wrote check after check to the church and argued with her about some legalistic, Biblical bullshit that neither she, nor anyone outside of the context of the lunatic messianic Jewish mind control organization cared about. Heaven was an unattainable place without strict adherence to a lexicon of rules and regulations. We could not eat in restaurants, even the Kosher places that served South Florida's Jewish community, because Irony of Ironies, my father's Old Testament based, legalistic church was also fiercely anti-semitic. He had been desperate for structure all of his life, obsessed with rules and standards in construction, the industry he labored in, and in his daily and spiritual life. I wondered what his life was like now. I imagined him finding some solace in the severity of monastic regimentation.
Ralph Stanley's melancholy voice moaned out an old Carter family tune on a boom box while I rolled paint on the walls of the rectory. The door opened. I was in a bit of a rhythm so a little panic and guilt struck me as I realized that anyone from the church would be expecting a shortish black man with a paint roller in his hand, not the gangly white boy that was currently there. I was in the shadow of the door opening, so I stepped back and craned over to see who was coming in. I was hoping it was Grover. It was a girl, a young woman really, her eyes swollen with hysterical crying, a soaked tissue hung limply from her left hand. She was beautiful. She was oblivious to the strands of her own hair stuck to her face. Two errant strands clung to her lips, which she held grimly in check to prevent the slightest quiver.
I stepped closer to her and placed my roller in its tray. She surveyed the room quickly, took a breath, and asked:
“Where is Father Douglas”?
“I don’t know. I’m just here to paint the place.”
She had been struggling to keep her shit together and now, trapped before a paint spattered stranger, she wasn’t going to make it. I stepped forward, handed her a clean rag for her nose and hugged her. She crumpled up in my arms, sobbing, burying her face in my shirt. I fell in love with her a little in that moment. I felt like her happiness was equal to my own. It was a surprising feeling, intense and childlike. Tender in the sense of a cut or bruise. I just wanted to protect her, absorb all of her pain into my shirt and set it on fire. I kissed her on top of her head and smelled her hair, taking in a deep drag as she began to gather her composure.
I guided her over to an empty bucket she could sit on where she blew her nose in the rag and started pulling the matted hair from her face, gathering it into a bun on the top of her head. She reached for her purse and looked up at me realizing she had left it in her car. I handed her a pencil I had in my back pocket and she deftly slid that in to hold the bun.
I didn’t know what to say to her. The only things you can say to a stranger who is weeping uncontrollably are completely idiotic or prying as all hell. But there really isn’t anything else to say. I went with idiotic.
“Are you okay”?
She nodded and then got up to go to the bathroom. I waited awkwardly in the living room, thinking of what else I could say that might seem less awkward. I found it.
“The priest should be back in two or three days. I know this because I have to be out of here by tomorrow night. I would guess he is coming the following morning.”
She stepped out of the bathroom and for the first time I got to see all of her. Short and athletic, with long hair, now in a neater bun, her face was a little small for her head, most people would describe her as cute, a girl next door type. She had a strength though, even in this moment of vulnerability, she had a strength that I couldn’t define in the moment but could admire immediately. In hindsight I know it was the strength that developed from support rather than abandonment. There was no anger in her.
“Thank you.”
She handed back my pencil and stuck her hands into her university sweatshirt. I noticed that Ralph Stanley was still playing in the background.
“I’m sorry.”
The words seemed appropriate when I thought of them, but after they exited my mouth, I felt like an idiot again. I resolved to speak only when spoken to.
“I’m going to go. Thank you again.”
She turned and darted out of the rectory. I looked at my shirt, tear stains all on the front of it and decided to pack up for the day. I was far too distracted to continue painting. Who knows how many other weeping co-eds were going to be bursting through the doors of the rectory. No, it was time for a beer and a burger, in that order.
The next morning, I went back to the rectory to finish up. I had about an hour of work left, but thinking of the girl had me stretching the work a bit. Two hours later I was loading the last of Grover’s borrowed tools into my truck when a Volkswagen Rabbit pulled up behind me. The girl emerged, and again I was as surprised as the day before. Yesterday, she was tiny- now, in her silk blouse and black slacks with a Tupperware of banana bread, she looked older. The strength I sensed only the edges of the afternoon before was fully-formed and it was the edges that were undefined. I felt far more awkward than she appeared to be. Most people our age look uncomfortable in dress clothes. They walk around like wearing Halloween costumes at Thanksgiving. She exuded the confidence necessary to fill the awkward gaps the rest of us hadn’t developed. I was impressed.
“I’m Susan.”
She stuck out her right hand for me to shake. I took it, swallowed it in my big paw.
“I’m… Ike.”
It felt awkward to use my first name again. And it dawned on me that I didn’t know Grover’s first name.
“I wanted to thank you for helping me yesterday. I felt kind of bad darting off like that, but I was expecting Pete…Father Douglas to be there. Here, I made you some banana bread.”
I opened the Tupperware and the cinnamon spicy, pulpy sweetness of the banana bread escaped into the air.
“Thank you. You look a lot better. If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?”
I closed the lid greedily, in case the smell escaped permanently.
“My mom was waiting at the light over by the credit union, the one near the Holsum bakery.”
I knew the intersection, it wasn’t too far from my apartment.
“This guy ran the red light and she ended up in the pond with the fountain in front of the bakery. The car was covered in water, and she had to squeeze out of the window, cause she couldn’t get the door open.”
“Jesus, is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s home now. She was in the hospital when I went to see Father Douglas and found you there. I had just spoken to my family and I guess it just overwhelmed me, you know, the thought of…”
She started to waver a bit, but she willed her lips back into the grimace from the day before. I didn’t tell her my mother had passed, although I thought of the day, sitting on my couch reading, when I heard the news.
“What you did, was really sweet.”
I felt a quivering vibrado of adolescent love humming along my insides. I shrugged my shoulders a little embarrassed.
“I was hoping to catch you here before you left so you would know everything is fine. Also, I was afraid you might think I was some sort of serial weeper or something.”
We laughed.
“Yeah, there was a poster in the church lobby saying to be on the look out, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention. It’s okay.”
She hugged me, kind of as an afterthought, and thanked me again before getting back into her car. I was walking back into the rectory when I realized I should have asked her if she wanted some coffee later. Maybe though, that would have been a little creepy. I sat down on the steps of the church and ate my banana bread.
I tried dating quite unsuccesfully in high school. I went out with a girl it took me three months to tighten up the courage to ask out, and she laughed at me. Another girl, one I used to surreptitiously draw pictures of while she sat in class, I got to know through a mutual friend and found that I didn't really like her at all. I also found that my drawings were simply part of a narcissitic shrine to herself. She had no idea it was me who drew them. My true disaster of a date though was with a college girl who asked me out while I carried her groceries to the car.
We went out for sushi, something new to me, and while I sat admiring the bright colors and shapes of fish flesh filleted beofre me, I grabbed the big inviting scoop of wasabi and popped it in my mouth. A half-hour of weeping and water chugging later and I was back at my house, embarrassed and alone on a Saturday night. For about a week I had a superhuman sense of smell. I spent those days like a dog, sniffing everything for its nuance and essence. After the wasabi incident, I gave up on dating for a while.
I saw Susan again while doing a campus recruiting drive for the Coast Guard. She was sitting at a big table outside of the food court, and I was in my dress uniform with two cups of coffee in my hands. The adolescent hormonal electricity struck me again when I saw the tight bun on top of her head. She was seated with three other girls each noshing their own bag lunch. All of them had carrot sticks and celery. I walked up behind her, and it was her friend Kelly who noticed me first, looking up from her sandwich with a big smile. I must have looked pretty sharp in my dress uniform with the new red crow and single chevron on the sleeves, but I felt like I was wearing a wool suit and no underwear.
“Hi, I’m Kelly.”
Kelly flitted her hand out for me to shake. I did, politely. Susan looked up, a little embarrassed to see me.
“Susan, who’s your friend”?
“I’m Ike, I met Susan when I was painting the church. She was having trouble with her Volkswagen and I helped her out.”
I don’t really know why I told the lie. I had the feeling that the truth would be out of school, and no explanation at all seemed seedy. I looked over at Susan, and could see a flicker of relief on her face.
“So sailor, what are you doing in town”? Kelly asked.
“Oh, I’m here with the Coast Guard recruiter for the career fair. If you ladies want, stop by the booth. We have free pens.”
I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to be able to ask Susan out in front of her friends, and that getting her away from them was going to be impossible. I started stalling by making polite conversation with the ladies hoping for an opportunity, dreading the fact that I was forcing one. Kelly gave me my opening.
“Are you busy on Thursday?” She asked batting her eyelashes playfully. Kelly was one of those girls that flirted with everyone. It was so overt that I felt like she was perhaps making fun of me. I wasn’t sure how to take it; awkwardly standing with two cups of rapidly cooling coffee in my hands while fishing for a date was not a good place to be in to make a call on that either. I had the feeling that Kelly was gobbling all of this up. I answered:
“No, why”?
“Weeeell, our club is going to English’s on Thursday at around 7:30 for a little dessert, if you want to, have a piece of pie.”
Susan cut her a look that Kelly noted, but chose to ignore.
“Sure, sure, I’ll be there at around 7:30. I should get back to my booth, my coffee is getting cold. So long Kelly, Bye Susan.”
“See you Thursday.”
I brought back the coffee and realized that I made a few errors in RSVPing back at the food court. I had no idea what kind of club this was, and what I was getting myself into. No matter, I thought, with Grover in the other duty section, I was spending a lot of my time alone. Social interaction on any level was a good thing. I doubted it was something too weird anyway.
I was right and wrong at the same time. The meeting was for an on-campus Christian fellowship group. A few of the kids met at English’s after the meeting every Thursday for dessert and gossip about the members who were not at English’s that night. They were a group of twelve which I found funny, but didn’t mention for fear of offending anyone. I sat down next to Susan. Kelly took the seat on the other side of me, and I got to know Susan.
She wasn’t from here. She grew up in Hagerstown, Maryland, a smallish civil war era town that was just inside the Shenandoah Valley. She had run Cross-Country and track for her high school and took a scholarship to Salisbury State. Her family was Catholic, but she wasn’t so into it. The Episcopal church she attended felt more comfortable, like the volume had been turned down a notch. The fellowship group was helping her find answers to some of her more pressing spiritual questions.
I told her about my father. How he was a member of a doomsday cult in the Seventies. Each week was a preparation for the end of the world. As a kid, it seemed so normal so reasonable that the world, in all of its complexity and beauty would be destroyed in some epic deital battle between God and Satan. It was exciting to me, a weird, toe headed kid living in an all black neighborhood. I had few friends growing up. In the mid Eighties, a kid named Omar lived next door to us. He didn’t attend school, so I would subject him to the bullshit my father dished out on a daily basis. We made forts in preparation for the second coming. We stole a bunch of sandbags from the drains during a flood one year and created a machine gun nest to pick off the devil’s minions as they invaded our neighborhood. Susan found the stories funny, and my knowledge of obscure bible verses came in handy with the rest of her friends. They assumed I was one of them, a believer, and I cultivated their assumption further. I wasn’t sure what Susan thought of me at first. I was a bit edgy around her, and she the same. It was as if we had made love during a drunken stupor, awakened together and decided to see what happened if we went out to breakfast while we sobered up. Only instead of it just being the two of us, it was two plus eleven complete strangers, at least to me.
The group reminded me of the Ala-teen meetings and the after meeting dinners with all the kids of drunks and addicts, with their own nomenclature of addiction and lack of polished social skills. Most of them spoke in the language of church, something I had a hard time understanding, but wasn’t too worried, I was there to see if I could to know Susan a little better. The check came, was divvied and then we all burst onto the parking lot, stomachs full of food and coffee, the cool April air slithering into the voids in our shirts and sweaters.
I offered Susan a ride. She and Kelly, her ride over, exchanged looks and possibly some psychic conversation that obviously ended in my favor-
“Susan, why don’t you go home with Ike, I have to head back to pick up my sister at her friends, and will probably keep you waiting like last time.”
Kelly’s knowing glance my way told me I owed her one. I didn’t like being in that position, but was grateful none the less. I walked with Susan to my car, opened her door and saw that she was shivering a bit.
“Hang on” I said, then pulled the seat of my truck forward and pulled out a wool blanket handing it to her. “You look cold, and the heat isn’t working in the truck. That is unless you want to get some carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Thank you. No, I learned my lesson from Molly Ringwold.”
The reference to the cheesy after school special of our youth was precious. It was clear to me now that Susan was comfortable, which helped me to lower my own guard a little further. She gave me directions to her apartment and we filled the time talking about her town. I had been there once, my parents thought about retiring in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which was just on the other side of the Potomac.
“What was the name of that super greasy burger place, the one that served the tiny cheesbur..”
“The one by the police station? That was the White Star Grill. Oh, my God, we used to go there after my brother’s football games when I was a kid. How do you know about that place?”
“My mother had a knack for finding the best of the worst. Maybe that’s why she married my father.”
We both laughed, then she asked:
“Your mom? Is she still alive?”
“No, cancer, about three years ago. She smoked like it was still the Seventies until the day she died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, she sounds like she was adventurous, if she ate at the White Star after seeing the outside of that dump.”
“Hey, did it ever catch on fire?”
“Are you kidding? The place burned down like, twice, but the people who ate there all donated to have it rebuilt. I think they never, what do you call that when they spray the water on something?”
She waved an imaginary pistol back and forth in her hand.
“Pressure cleaning.”
“Yeah, they never pressure cleaned the bricks from the last fire, that’s why they had that big black streak on the front of the building.”
The truck was warming up as we idled in front of her apartment complex chatting about growing up and realizing how different we were from each other, how exotic her life seemed to me, and mine to her. Her family was pretty normal, they participated in social events, and attended functions. My family was always in seclusion, with a few trusted outsiders let in occasionally. I was raised in an environment where my family were the oddballs. We were the only whites on our block. Susan had been surrounded by friends her entire life, been involved in sports, and after-school activities. I had one, country listening, pickup truck loving, German-speaking friend in this whole town, and hadn't spoken to anyone I knew from high school since, before graduation.
“I had a really good time tonight.” Susan said tapping me on my knee.
“Me too, look.”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my official Coast Guard notepad and wrote my number on it.
“I’d like to see you again. Here’s my number. Call me if you want to drive up to Hagerstown for a gastro-intestinal adventure. Or, we can do something here. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“Thanks again, Ike.”
She kissed me on the cheek and darted up the sidewalk to her apartment. I waited to see that she got in before I drove back home, feeling drunk from that peck on the cheek.
Susan and I dated – if you could call it that. It was kind of like we simply became a couple without the formalized dating that occurs between adults. We were rarely alone, except when one of us was driving with the other somewhere. The only definable dates we had were when I prepared Chicken Marsala at my apartment to surprise her one night for dinner. I lit candles, and used a white sheet I absconded with from the station as a tablecloth on my wobbly dinette set. I put too much wine in the sauce, and the pasta was a bit mushy, but she didn’t complain. It was a quiet, pleasant evening that ended with us listening to Teddy Pendergrass and kissing passionately on my couch. Her body was tiny and kissing her should have been awkward but it wasn’t. It reminded me to keep my mouth closed. I savored her delicateness.
Mostly though, we were surrounded by Susan’s friends from the Christian group. They spent almost all of their time talking about church and Jesus and blessings and about their own grace and salvation I got a little sick of it. Not to mention the fact that they were constantly prying into my own religious beliefs. Her friends were one-dimensional, noisy and boisterous about their faith with little to show for it. Who the hell was I to complain though, I had no other friends.
I got the feeling that they sensed that I wasn’t one of them. Like the Saved had a certain scent about them that I lacked. I didn’t know how to play this. I kept acting normally, politely deflecting any probing questions into the nature of my faith; or lack thereof. This is was really what caused the breakup, according to Susan anyway, my utter lack of faith. I think we were both sort of looking for that moment, that first moment when we met. I wanted to see her vulnerable and strong simultaneously like she was in the rectory doorway, or when she held her coffee early in the morning, clutching it close to her in both hands. She wanted to feel the presence of whatever it was that made me love a stranger without reserve and I couldn’t give that to the girl that I spent most of my free time with.
So there it was, Susan and I were hovering, over what, I wasn’t sure. I had fallen into a sort of comfort. Most of the church types had given up on converting me after a few months, which forced them to have a non-religious conversation with me. Some of these people even knew what I did for a living. Mostly though, those were the girls. The guys were Ritalin-focused on conversion. Any and all conversation with me was designed to get me to say I love Jesus with all my heart. With every casual exchange of words I could see them scheming, their collective eyes alive with the Holy Spirit. Normally, I would politely evade their pries by cutting conversations short, or simply smiling and nodding vacantly when they would “academically” mention what the love of Christ had done for them. Eventually, I lost my shit.
The fellas from Susan’s crew had all gone to some major Jesus fest on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington D.C. They rented buses, got cheap hotels, and joined with a bunch of their fellow Christians to bring back traditional male female roles into post-modern America. They were also given the mission to double their efforts in converting the non-believers, specifically in their home towns. In order to create a national voting bloc, or open the world to the salvation of Christ.
The following Thursday, at English’s chicken, we all piled into several booths and ordered our coffee and pie. I normally sat next to Susan, but that night I was surrounded by dudes. Susan looked at me perplexed, and my spidey-sense was tingling.
“Ike, did your parents believe?”
That was Chris, a plump, short haired kid who sometimes led the group in prayer when the official campus associate of The group was away on business.
“Did they believe what?”
I wasn’t going to make it easy for them. I was like the Russian Army I backed up and burned everything in my path.
“C’mon Ike, don’t play games with us.”
James, the kid with the retainer played the bad cop in this interrogation. Interesting choice, I thought. I wondered if they were attempting to
“Did your parents attend church?”
He had difficulty with the word 'church' I thought this was funny.
I gave the question some thought and decided I would answer all of their questions truthfully, just to see their reaction.
“Yes, my father is a member of a dangerous religious cult, and my mother was Anglican.”
My candor, the word cult, and the use of the past tense in reference to my mother had a couple heads turning toward our conversation. Susan’s was one of them.
“What was the name of your Father's cult”?
His voice held genuine concern, but it felt mocking and cruel.
“It is none of your business. Next question.”
I didn’t want to hear more rhetoric about my father’s faith and its flaws according to mainstream dogma. How my father’s view is too legalistic, and most of all I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t need reminding how fucked up my dad’s world view is, I had plenty of memories for that. Piles of non-kosher food rotting in black garbage cans in the South Florida heat, Domesticated ducks, the ones with the disgusting orange shit on their faces, pecking and digging into the garbage while my mom and I pulled away in the big yellow Cutlass. The house felt so silent and still, and even at five or six, I knew I was never going to be there again.
James apologized, but it was Chris who I glared at waiting for the next question. I thought it best to go on the offensive. I flanked them.
“Just what is it that you want from me exactly? How are my personal religious beliefs any business of yours? If it is truly a matter of faith, as you all so eloquently put it in all of your lectures, then isn’t it conceivable that spending your time arguing about the trappings of everyone else’s faith is pointless?”
“We’re just trying to help you Ike. We are concerned for your soul.” James said weakly.
“I think you are more concerned with your own egos.”
I stood up to leave, reaching into my pocket to pay for my pie and coffee, looking at Susan. She looked away in shame. I tossed a ten dollar bill on the table and began to walk out. My better judgment apparently fled before me.
“Another thing, for a bunch of Christians trying to improve the world, I have one question for you: What have you done for the least among us, huh?”
They all looked up, but around me, not at me.
“I thought so. You aren’t Christians, you’re a self-help group of mutual masturbators. Good night.”
I went home still angry from the confrontation - angry with myself for losing composure, and angry at the Jesus freaks for provoking me. The night was a series of halves.I half read, skimming over the words without focus, and I half slept, turning and kicking the sheets off of me. Mostly, I waited for Susan to call me.
The next morning I headed to the station.
