The Miseducation of Cameron Post - by Emily M. Danforth

Chapter Seventeen

Adam Red Eagle came back from Christmas break with his gorgeous hair all shorn off, to right up against his scalp, just stubble there really, though it started growing in fast. His father had insisted, and Adam said there was no way around his father’s insistence. He made his voice puffed up when he imitated him: We’re not savages anymore. And for Chriss sake we’re not women, either. The weird thing was that Adam’s now nearly bald head did nothing to make him any less womanly, or less feminine; in fact, it accentuated his high cheekbones and amazing skin, the Dietrich arch of his eyebrows, his full lips, all of his beauty somehow now spotlighted without that curtain of hair.

A few other things had changed since our return. I now had decoration privileges (though items had to first be approved by Lydia, and since there was nothing approved that I felt like Scotch-taping up there, I just left my lonely iceberg adrift on a sea of drywall). I was also now far enough along in the program to be a part of weekly group support sessions, which replaced my one-on-ones with Rick but not, unfortunately, with Lydia. While home in Idaho, Jane had purchased quite a lot of killer pot off of someone she mysteriously described as an old flame, a tragedy of a woman, and she used that to supplement our dwindling stock. And finally, the Viking Erin had begun a New Year’s regime of Christian aerobics, one that had already lasted past the first-week burnout of so many similar kinds of resolutions.

She’d brought back to Promise a couple of videotapes, three brand-new workout outfits, and a blue plastic aerobic step with black traction pads across its top. She was all business. The videos were from the Faithfully Fit line and both of them featured Tandy Campbell, a perky brunette “cheerleader for Christ” who was compact and trim and totally rocked her shiny spandex tank tops and black Lycra stretch pants.

Erin was so excited. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase before she was thrusting those tapes in my face, Tandy beaming at me above the title: Joyful Steps—Cardio for Christ.

“Will you do it with me?” she asked, performing a mock arm curl with the tape. “Lydia says we can use the rec room if we get up early.”

“I didn’t even know that Jesus was into aerobics,” I said. “I’ve always imagined him as a speed walker, maybe across water.”

“How can you not know Tandy Campbell?” she asked, now holding both tapes straight out in front of her, one in each hand, and doing a series of arm extensions and retractions that I guess were supposed to be somehow aerobic, though they looked kind of like the moves a traffic cop might use. “She’s a huge big deal. H-U-G-E—huge! My mom went to one of her power weekends in San Diego with two of my aunts. They got to meet her. They said she’s totally tiny in person, but still a presence, a real dynamic presence.”

“I bet my aunt Ruth knows about her,” I said. “I bet she’s a fan.”

“I’m sure,” Erin said, now doing some leg bends with the arm movements, which had grown noticeably less grand and precise, even in just the thirty seconds or so she’d been at it. “She’s totally amazing; everybody’s a fan. You have to do them with me—please? Please, please, please? I need a workout buddy and you can’t run right now anyway. You won’t be able to until April, probably.”

She was right about that. We’d had snow at Promise since mid-October, but there had been feet and feet added during our couple of weeks away, and now everything except for the main road, which one of the neighboring ranchers plowed for us, and the path to the barn, which we all took turns shoveling, was mounded in white drifts, some so high and strangely shaped from the wind that there was no way at all to tell what was under them, or where solid ground might begin.

I thought that I’d do the tapes with her a couple of times, see them enough to make fun of them effectively when I reported back to Jane and Adam. (Lydia had given Erin permission to invite all the female disciples to these morning workout sessions; however, Christian aerobics were not, apparently, an appropriately gendered activity for men.) I don’t know if it was maybe the lure of the almighty VHS tape reminding me of my days of freedom, but it didn’t take very many mornings before I was in the habit of waking up to Tandy and her shiny smile, her bouncy energy, her strangely endearing habit of renaming standard aerobics moves in Jesusy ways, even if her substitutions didn’t really make sense and she overused the word praise: Grapevine = Praise-Vine; March It Out = March Your Praise; all manner of kicks or punches = Joy Blasts.

Other than those substitutions, and the syncopated thump-thump-boom of remixed gospel songs, the only thing discernibly Christian about Tandy’s workouts were the warm-up and cool-down meditations, wherein she would use the Word to motivate us toward our fitness goals. Her favorite passage was Hebrews 12:11—No discipline is pleasant while it’s happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way. And at first, Tandy’s workouts were kind of painful and intense, Erin out of breath by six minutes in, and afterward both of us with bangs stuck to our sticky foreheads in the breakfast line, where Erin was also practicing discipline, even choosing cottage cheese and canned peaches on the days when Reverend Rick made his Rice Krispies–coated cinnamon French toast. Sometimes Helen Showalter would join us in the rec room, her movements clunky and her steps hard, shaking the leaves of the potted plants. Jane came once, to take Polaroids, mostly, and a few times Lydia came, to observe our behavior I guess. She sure didn’t launch into a step, joy-clap, squat, step. But it was usually just the two of us. Erin’s clothes were looser by a couple weeks in, and by Valentine’s Day they’d replaced parts of her Promise Uniform with a whole size smaller and she’d had her mom send us a care package via the mail service offered by Greyhound Bus Lines (which took twelve days to arrive in Bozeman but was cheap for sending heavy stuff). Her package contained two sets of eight-pound dumbbells coated in purple rubber and a new tape to keep us motivated: SPIRITUAL LIFT—Toning More Than Your Muscles.

When I was seven or eight, I was sort of obsessed with those sticky-hand things you could buy for twenty-five cents from the toy dispensers lined up just inside the automatic doors at grocery stores. The hands were usually some neon color, five fingered but puffy and cartoonish, and attached to a longish cord of the same material. I collected all the versions: the glitter sticky hand and the glow-in-the-dark sticky hand and the jumbo-size sticky hand. I used to drape them over my doorknob and choose just one or two for any given day, like some girls might have chosen their jewelry. There wasn’t much you could do with them, really, besides whip them at people and watch them cringe or squeal or laugh when the stickiness smacked their skin, though there was something satisfying in the way the weight of the hand would stretch thin the cord, so thin sometimes you were just sure it would snap, and then the whole thing would spring back to its original shape and size. The worst thing about the sticky hands was their propensity for collecting tiny fibers and hairs, dust, muck, and the difficulty of properly cleaning them after that happened. You couldn’t, really, ever quite get them clean again.

The longer I stayed at Promise, the more all the stuff they were throwing at me, at us, started to stick, just like to those sticky hands, in little bits, at first, random pieces, no big deal. For instance, maybe I’d be in bed during lights out and I’d start to think about Coley and kissing Coley, and doing more with Coley, or Lindsey, or whomever, Michelle Pfeiffer. But then I might hear Lydia’s voice saying, You have to fight these sinful impulses: fight, it’s not supposed to be easy to fight sin, and I might totally ignore it, or even laugh to myself about what an idiot she was, but there it would be, her voice, in my head, where it hadn’t been before. And it was other stuff too, these bits and pieces of doctrine, of scripture, of life lessons here and there, until more and more of them were coated on, along for the ride, and I didn’t consistently question where they had come from, or why they were there, but I did start to feel kind of weighed down by them.

Part of what contributed to this weighing down was undoubtedly my new group support sessions. Our group consisted of Steve Cromps, Helen Showalter, Mark Turner, and superskinny, Southern-drawled Dane Bunsky, a disciple I got to know better very quickly (support group had a way of making that happen). Dane was a recovering meth addict who was at Promise as the scholarship child of some megachurch in Louisiana.

We met in the classroom on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at three p.m., pushing the chairs into a circle, a chorus of metal scraping linoleum that was nails on chalkboard to me. Lydia would bring a box of tissues to each session, and she’d also wheel in a cart with a big urn of hot water on it and mugs, a container of instant hot chocolate mix, and also this completely addictive mixture of Tang and loose tea and instant lemonade powder that Reverend Rick made in big batches and called Russian tea, apparently as some sort of dated cosmonaut joke. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the drink cart, though, until the fifteen-minute midsession break.

We started each session with a prayer chain. All of us, Lydia included, would join hands, and whoever’s turn it was that day would start by saying: I will not pray for God to change me because God does not make mistakes and I am the one who is tempted by sin: Change will come through God, but within me. I must be the change. You had to say this exactly, word for word, and if you didn’t, Lydia would interrupt the prayer chain and make the starter repeat it until it was perfect. My first go-round I kept forgetting the word because and I had to say the whole thing like four times.

After the starting prayer was said correctly, the starter would squeeze either of their hands, and the recipient of the squeeze would add something of their own, usually something about asking God for strength, or thanking Jesus for this time together, something, and then we’d continue around the circle. Sometimes the prayers were more personal or pointed, but since this chain was just the opening proceeding to an extended share session, usually not. We were supposed to keep our eyes closed during this time, to focus on Christ alone, but I got to know my brethren by the feel of their hands: Helen’s thick grip and fast-pitch softball calluses, still not completely healed despite months of not playing; Dane’s skin, cracked and rough; Lydia’s thin fingers as icy as you’d imagine them, exactly so. When the prayers again reached the starting person, their job was then to say: The opposite of the sin of homosexuality is not heterosexuality: It is Holiness. It is Holiness. It is Holiness. I loved it when it was Dane’s turn, because his accent and the lazy slow-speak way that he said absolutely everything, no matter what, made that mantra sound strangely seductive.

We were allowed to move beyond our childhoods in these sessions and to actually talk about more recent experiences we’d had concerning the sin of homosexual behavior and temptation, though Lydia would frequently cut short particular monologues with “That’s enough of that—we’re not here to glorify our past sins; we’re here to acknowledge and repent for them.” Or, once, “Too much detail, Steve! Too much! Let’s remember who’s in the details, shall we?” I think that was the only time I ever heard her even attempt something like a joke, which maybe isn’t so much a criticism, because there was usually very little about support group that was funny.

Dane and Helen had both been molested, which Lydia said was a common reason that people found themselves unnaturally attracted to members of the same sex: in Helen’s case because abuse from her uncle Tommy had convinced her that being feminine meant being weak and vulnerable to such abuse, and because it made her fear any sexual intimacy with men; and in Dane’s case because he had been abandoned by his father at an early age and therefore had an unhealthy curiosity about men, one that manifested into an obsession when a much older boy placed in the same foster home forcefully suggested the two of them fool around. Dane had also spent time as a runaway hustling for meth, and those stories, full of older men and their dingy apartments and trailers, Dane’s all-consuming addiction, were completely gruesome, even without the specific sexual details.

I had determined, after the first few sessions, that even with my dead parents, Steve’s textbook lisp and unyielding fey ways, and Mark’s preacher dad, we three couldn’t really compete with Dane and Helen in the arena of justification for our sinful homosexual attractions. Their pasts almost sanctioned their fucked-up notions, but we three did the fucking up on our own. This was especially fascinating to me when it came to Mark Turner. Here he was, poster boy for a Christian upbringing, but yet here he was, at Promise, just like the rest of us. Only he wasn’t like the rest of us. He was so perfect and good. Adam and Jane and I joked, sometimes, that he was a plant, that he didn’t struggle with same-sex attraction at all but was at Promise as part of a holy mission, one intended to benefit the rest of us, to show us the way a model disciple would work the system. But then came the Thursday in early March when it was Mark’s turn to share.

Like always, Lydia flipped through this old-school composition book she had, scanning whatever she’d jotted down from the last group share done by whoever was going. Usually she’d then ask some sort of question intended to elicit a lengthy response, but that day, with Mark waiting patiently, his giant Bible on his lap with literally hundreds of page markers and slips of paper protruding from it like feathers, she said, “Is there something specific you’d like to focus on this week, Mark?”

And I, for one, was dumbfounded, not only because she’d asked the question almost sweetly, certainly more good cop than bad, but mostly because in asking it she was relinquishing some control, handing it over to a disciple, and that I’d definitely never seen from her. For his part, Mark also seemed sort of taken aback; he shrugged his shoulders and wedged his eyebrows down and in toward his nose, and said, quietly, “I don’t know. I can talk about whatever you think is best.”

The last time he’d shared, I remembered, he’d talked a lot about one or two impure daydreams he’d had about an assistant pastor from his father’s church. Fairly chaste daydreams, it had seemed to me. In one of them the two of them held hands outside while hiking. Maybe they were shirtless, too—but really, not much happened. I guess he could have stripped them free of any of the more damning details, just to make sure they were cleared for retelling, but I doubt it. I think Mark Turner’s struggles were likely almost entirely those of thought and emotion, battling the way he felt about men—the way some part of him wanted to feel about them—but not anything he’d actually ever done with them.

“Okay,” Lydia said, still flipping through her notes, but pretty obviously doing so to gather her words and not because she was actually gleaning anything new from them. “I know that you’ve had an especially hard couple of weeks, and I thought that maybe there was something more pressing than not for you right now.”

“Every week is especially hard,” Mark said, not looking at her but flicking the cover of his Bible so that it lifted open some and then fell back against his finger where he flicked it again. “Everything is pressing.”

“Okay,” Lydia tried again. “But is there something—”

“How about everything,” Mark said. “How about every single thing.” He had raised his voice some, which was weird coming from him, unexpected, and he almost seemed like he was pulsating energy or rage or something, like it was sort of racquetballing around inside his small body, smacking here and there, and it was taking work to keep it contained. I was across the circle from him but I could see the way his neck muscles were taut, all of him rigid and uncomfortable. He gritted out this next part: “If you want me to say something about my father, then you should just say so.”

Lydia, pen poised above her notebook, said, “It sounds to me like it’s you who wants to talk about your father’s decision.”

“What’s there to say?” he asked. “You read the letter, Lydia, same as me.” He paused then, looked around the circle, a strange sort of grin on his face. “But I can share it with the group, the important part.” He puffed himself up some, there on his chair, and changed his voice, made is a shade deeper. “‘Your visit home at Christmas confirmed my fears that you are still very feminine and weak. I cannot have this weakness in my home. It sends the message to my congregation that I approve of it when I do not. You will stay the summer and we will readdress your progress come August. You are not ready to come home.’” He settled back in his chair, not much, but enough to tell us that he was done. He tried to look pleased, to smirk, but he wore it wrong. His face just looked, in that moment, feral. “‘You are not ready to come home,’” he said again.

Through all of this, Lydia was calm as ever. She didn’t even react to his comment about her role as mail screener. She finished writing something and asked, “What specific thing happened at Christmas, Mark? What led to your father’s decision?”

He snorted. “I happened. Just me. Like always. It’s enough for me to just walk in the room the way I am.”

“What way are you, Mark?” she asked.

“I want to read something,” he said, his voice louder than before, just edging on frantic but not quite there. “Can I read a passage? It’s one of my father’s favorites. He reminds me of it every chance he gets.”

“Please do,” Lydia said.

So then Mark stood and read aloud a passage that I don’t think I’d ever heard before that day, but one that I’ve revisited again and again since: Second Corinthians 12:7–10. Maybe I shouldn’t say that he read the passage, because even though he had his Bible open and held out in front of him, he didn’t need to look at it very often.

“And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.”

He paused here, looked up to the ugly paneled ceiling of the classroom, or beyond that, probably. He was such a small guy, and everything about him usually so composed. I’d heard him read Scripture lots of times before, his voice always clear and assured, just like the Sunday-morning Bible Hour broadcast. Mark’s voice as he spoke this passage on this day, though, kept that nearly frantic tremble in it.

“And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” He paused again here, squinted his eyes, and bunched up his face to keep from crying. He shook his head back and forth, fast, and then somehow forced out the rest of the passage through the clench of his jaw, each word its own victory over a complete breakdown. “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

Mark breathed out hard when he finished, like some guys do when they’re repping weights, and he closed his Bible and in the very next instant let it drop from his hands. Its descent was impossibly slow, like it took movie editing to make it happen, but its sharp smack against the floor was entirely of the moment, and as loud and uncomfortable as it could possibly be.

Lydia tried to subdue that moment with her typical ice, and said, “There’s no need for cheap theatrics. If you sit down, we can talk about the passage you’ve selected.”

But Mark wasn’t done with the theatrics, and he sure as hell wasn’t sitting down. “I didn’t do the selecting. Weren’t you listening?” he said. “My dad selected it for me. He’d have it tattooed on my back if tattoos weren’t condemned in Leviticus 19:28. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”

Lydia half stood and motioned her hand for him to take his chair. “Sit down, Mark. We can talk about all of this.”

But instead of sitting, he moved into the center of our small circle, the farmer in the dell, and said, “You know the best thing about my dad’s passage?” He didn’t wait for anyone to answer him. “It has for Christ’s sake built right in. It’s built right in.”

He started doing jumping jacks. He did. Perfect-form, hand-clap-above-the-head jumping jacks as he shouted, “‘For when I am weak then am I strong!’ In my dad’s passage, weakness actually equals strength. That means I have the strength of ten Marks. Twenty! Eighty-five! All my weakness makes me the strongest man alive.”

He stopped short the jumping jacks and crouched down then, so fast, and with military precision he put his two palms flat on the floor and shot his small legs out behind him, leveled off his back, and knocked out push-ups, one after another, chanting, “For Christ’s sake,” as he pushed back into start position from each. “For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!”

He’d done at least five, Lydia saying, “Stop it, Mark. Stop all of this right now!” before she managed, as he was in the down position, to get her right foot, a foot clad in a black loafer, planted squarely on the small of his back. She seemed to apply enough weight to keep him from rising back up. She remained in that position while she said, “I’ll remove my foot when you’re ready to stand up and get control of your behavior.”

But then Mark, with the strength of eighty-five Marks, like he’d said, grunting and sort of squealing through the grit of his teeth, the clench of his jaw, started extending those elbows and raising himself back off the ground, and Lydia, shifting her hip to allow for this new position, lost her balance, and though, once she was steady again, she tried to apply more weight to the foot, you could tell it was too late. Mark was powering through, and then, sure enough, he was all the way up, Lydia standing stupidly with one foot still on his back, but now looking like an explorer in a snapshot with her foot up on some rock or outcropping.

But just as soon as he’d made it, he was done, and he collapsed back to the floor, sobbing now, his face mashed into the laminate. He was making all kinds of noises, and saying things, I’m not sure what, exactly, I know I heard sorry a couple of times, and I can’t, I can’t do it. Lydia crouched down next to him, put her hand on his back, she didn’t rub it or anything, she just placed it there and said, not to him, but to all of us, “Go to your rooms until dinner. Go directly to your rooms and nowhere else.”

And when none of us moved, she said, “You will go right now and not a moment later.” And we did. We gathered our notebooks and pretended, poorly, not to linger, watching Mark, who was still crying on the floor. As the rest of us walked to the door, I noticed Dane hover next to his chair, trying to stay, I guess. But Lydia shook her head no at him, and then he joined the rest of us in the hallway, where we looked at one another with big eyes and open mouths. And even though we walked back to our rooms as a group, we were a silent group, nobody really sure what to say, or what to make of what had just happened.

Finally Steve said, lowly, “That was intense—that was more intense than anything.”

“If it was intense for you, think about how it was for him,” Dane said, sharp and mean. “It wasn’t nothin’ for all of us, faggot.”

“Jesus,” Steve said, “I didn’t even mean it like that.” But Dane pushed past him, and after that none of us said anything; we just went to our rooms like we were told.

Mark wasn’t at dinner. By then most all of the other disciples knew what had happened and I could tell everyone was waiting for him to show up. When Adam walked into the dining hall alone, there were obvious glances and whispers from the cliques in the food line and those already pulled up to a table, starting in on their mac ’n’ cheese with cut-up hot dogs and a side of green beans and canned pears.

“What’s the full report?” Jane asked Adam as he joined our table, his plate holding three ice-cream scoops of the synthetic orange, glumpy noodles and pink hot dog bites.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t even know anything had happened, and then I come back from evangelical detail and find Rick and Lydia in our room and Mark is like out of it, completely, a total zombie; he’s sitting on the edge of his bed and the two of them are practically on top of him saying all sorts of shit, but he’s in la-la land. And I’m going, Is anybody gonna clue me in, here?”

“What were they saying to him?” I asked.

“Just like the usual junk: It’s gonna be all right; you’re facing your sin and that takes courage; you just need to rest and pray; whatever. None of it was penetrating, at least as far as I could tell.” Adam had been loading up his fork with noodles since he’d sat down. I usually loved to watch him eat mac ’n’ cheese, or anything else made with elbow noodles. It took him forever. He’d maneuver one noodle onto each fork tine, four in all, little tubes stacked one next to another, and then spear a piece of hot dog on the end, and then take a bite. But that night his dedication to his food routine was annoying me.

His fork was loaded now, so he took his bite and said, “I didn’t hear much anyway, because two minutes after I walked in, Lydia sent me to Steve and Ryan’s room. But then at least Steve told me all about Mark’s show of strength, if Steve can be believed. Did he really knock out a push-up with Lydia standing on his back?”

“She wasn’t completely standing on it,” I said. “But she had one foot on it, some of her weight.”

“Our group never has this kind of entertainment,” he said, scowling at Jane as if it was her fault for not bringing the drama. “Couldn’t you do cartwheels or something?” He was loading his fork again.

“I used to be able to do a spectacular crab walk,” she said. “All the way across the floor and up a wall.”

“That could work,” Adam said.

I knew they were just doing what we always did, making a joke out of everything because it sucked to be here and we didn’t want any part of it and why not just laugh everything off because we obviously knew better than any of the assholes running the place, but this time—I don’t know, maybe because I’d actually been there and had seen Mark, had seen him lose his shit, had seen him sobbing with his face in the floor—the way we were treating what had happened made me even more annoyed, and I guess sort of angry, too.

“I can also juggle a little,” Jane said, picking up the bowl her pears had been in and tilting it to her mouth, drinking the Vaseline-colored juice, then wiping her face before saying, “How do you think I could work that into a share session?”

“Maybe you could—” Adam started, but I cut him off.

“It was scary,” I said, not looking at either of them but talking more loudly than I normally might. “He was completely out of control. It was hard to watch. I mean, it seemed funny at first, and great that Lydia couldn’t get him to sit down, but when he just kept going, it really wasn’t funny at all.”

“It must have been a little bit funny,” Jane said.

“Not really,” I said, looking at her. “Not if you were in the room as it was happening right in front of you.”

Jane made her patented unreadable Jane face, but I’d come to associate it with her disapproval or doubt or both.

“I get what you’re saying,” Adam said. “I guess it’s just because we didn’t see it that it seems too crazy to be taken seriously.”

“It was crazy,” I said. “And it was completely serious, too.”

Jane kept her blank face on for the rest of the meal, but she didn’t talk anymore about crab walking or juggling, either.

Later, in our room, the Viking Erin said she needed a hug and so I gave her one and it was not the worst thing ever. It was actually seminice. Then she said she was going to pray for Mark and asked me if I wanted to join her and I said I did. And I did. And it was sort of nice, too. Maybe not the praying itself so much as treating what had happened with a certain amount of respect. It felt like something better than just making a joke out of it, anyway.