Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married (21 page)

“They don't move outta a dollhouse easy,” he says. “Usually one of us has to burn it down first. Ma'am, tell me, you brought something in this house from Mongkok, didn't you.”

“Um . . . How did you know?”

“What was it? Opium pipe? Hash log? A rolled-up Tibetan rug? Don't worry, old Hutch isn't here to turn anybody in. No, sir. I've transported my share of illegal artifacts and shoved substances up my ass; I only ask because I need to know what we're dealing with. You ever hear of a Mongkok Slasher?” he asks.

“A what?”

“A Mongkok Slasher! I was stationed there back in the army. Mongkok is the most beautiful crowded cesspool on earth. Like diamonds floating in shit, you know? You fall asleep on the train standing up . . . and you don't never fall down, hear me? They got rats there the size of porcupines. Have sharp yellow teeth like needles. They can slash their way through drywall, steel plating, bone. What you got here, lady, is an advanced Hong Kong Mongkok Slasher infestation.”

“Glad I don't have to say that twice.”

“What was it you brung from Sin City?”

“The crib mattress!” I tell him “I put a baby's crib mattress . . . in the crib . . . it was so cute . . . with little butterflies on it . . .”

“They love cute!” he says. “Why don't you just lay out saucers a milk for 'em and knit their babies socks? Better knit fast, though . . . I'd say a pair a minute.” Hutch whips off his hat and slaps his own knee. “Sonofabitch, lady! Pardon my Mandarin, but you might as well've called up a Mongkok rat nursery and had them ship you a batch of babies. These things can breed as fast as fruit flies. Faster!”

Brad and I have to move in with his parents while the house is fully fumigated.

“Now do you believe me?” I ask Brad at the Keller dinner table. “Our child could've been in that crib . . . your grandchild, Mrs. Keller. Do you know what rats do to babies? Brad, your son might've gone through life with a face like Hamburger Helper. Now, you swear to me, Brad Keller, swear you'll stop working with those horrible Christian Lambs!”

Brad looks down and promises.

Mother Keller and Ed promise too; that's the one good thing that comes from staying with them. They're witness to my emotional breakdown.

I think I finally got through.

Desperate to see my family, I happily go to this week's Supper Club. The theme is baby food, and everything must be blended or pureed, in honor of the twins. Neither Lenny nor Hailey has a single beer the whole time, and in the backyard there's a huge banner that says
WELCOME TO EARTH, BILLY AND BUDDY!
It's as though they aren't children but visiting extraterrestrials. “Look at these boys!” Lenny comes over with an infant tucked in each arm. “I'm gonna build them a super fort in the backyard.”

Hailey smacks him. “No you're not, Lenny!”

“Like hell I'm not! My boys need a super fort!”

“They're
infants,
Lenny. Infants don't need a super fort.”

“Like hell they don't!”

“No fort.”

“Fort!”

I'm sitting on a wagon-wheel bench, trying to eat a “liquid taco,” when Hailey drops a baby on my lap. “Here,” she says to me, “hold Billy.”

“That's Buddy,” Lenny says. “He's got the crazy eye.”

“He does
not
have a crazy eye, Lenny. Stop saying that.”

“He's got a big wiener too.”

“You can't tell them apart by
that,
” she whispers. “They
both
do.”

“Lord,
don't I know it
!” Lenny hollers, and slaps his knee. “Chucker, you gotta check my boys out. They are
huge
. I mean it's like little racks a beef tenderloin hanging out there.
Hooo-wee!
”

“You know,” I say politely, “I probably shouldn't hold the baby. These pants are silk.”

“So?” Hailey thrusts the blue bundle at me. “This baby is a
baby
.”

“Give him to me,” Mom says, and I gladly pass it over.

I stay late at the Supper Club and drink too much. Lenny drives me home. “You doin' okay there, kid?” he asks, and I tell him I'm doing great. Any day now I'll be pregnant and I'll probably have triplets, who will kick his twins' butts.

“Right on,” Lenny says. “It's a date!”

I invite him and Hailey to come for Easter brunch with the rest of my family. It's good for everyone to spend time together, create a sense of community. I had no idea that brunch would be so important . . . or when such big news would hit.

We're all there, gathered around the table for brunch at the club on Easter Sunday. The dining room is packed. Everyone we know is there with their families. Waiters zip around the room delivering special-order omelets and more iced tea while expertly dodging sugar-crazed children who're tearing around the dining room hopped up on Easter candy found during the annual Easter egg hunt. Trevor got a time-out and had to go sit in the car after overdosing on sugary pink marshmallow Peeps.

Then Ed stands up. He says he was moved by something during the sermon at church that morning. When Pastor Mike spoke about the father and the son, and how we must repent to be forgiven for our sins, that's when it hit him. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. Then he pauses and looks around the table. “Where's Lenny?” he asks, and everybody scans the room. “He's getting more pancakes!” somebody says.

We wave him over. Lenny nods. He's at the pancake trolley with the twins, loading up his plate for the third time. Lenny has a remarkable ability to hold both the twins while he's doing anything. Right now he's holding them squished together in their little pink Easter Bunny outfits with one arm, while he holds his pancake plate out with the other. Hailey meanwhile asks the waiter for more iced tea. Lenny returns and Ed resumes his speech. “My son has repented,” he says. “Brad has shown me over the past several months his dedication to the Keller's company.” I sneak a peek over at Sarah, whose face freezes, her pale skin porcelain white, her glossy lips pressed into a grim line.

Ed goes on to say the decision to pick a new president is always a hard one, especially when both candidates are your children. Nevertheless, in order to prosper, a company needs a leader . . . and he needs a better handicap on his golf game! The table titters at his lame retirement joke. We titter tensely and we all lean in.

“I've decided the next president of Keller's will be . . . my son . . . Bradford!”

“Dad!” Brad leaps up, knocking over his water glass, and hugs his father.

Meanwhile the water from his glass races across the table and dumps right into Sarah's lap, and she jumps up like a cat bit her, springing away from the table.

“Yep,” her husband, Bill, says with a sigh. “Tonight's gonna be a long one.”

Poor Bill.

Brad and I go home that night and for the first time in weeks we have sex. He even initiates it. He pushes me up against our bedroom wall and kisses me. He says I'm the best wife in the entire world. “I have no idea why you've put up with me,” he says.

I tell him neither do I.

Then he opens a bottle of champagne.

“Champagne?” I say. “Are you sure you want to be . . . drinking?”

“Why not, baby!” He whips off my high heel and pours bubbly into it.

“Brad!”

“What?”

I stifle the urge to tell him drinking champagne is considered a real no-no for recovering alcoholics. Struggling even harder, I refrain from saying those are seven-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahniks.

“We did it!” he says, gulping down bubbly champagne from the heel of my shoe. “It's time to celebrate!” He holds the high heel up to my mouth and tips it back, into my lips. I laugh as a cold stream of champagne surges forward, running down my neck and pooling in my cleavage. We drink three bottles.

He makes love to me passionately, wildly, all over the room, like a merchant marine on shore leave. I'm so excited I can hardly get my underwear off. I can't help mentally noting that I'm ovulating, according to my handy fertility calendar.

He finishes early. I roll and groan and tell him I want more. We bang on the sofa, the dresser, and the closet floor. It's three in the morning by the time we stumble into bed. I manage to set my alarm clock, remembering tomorrow's an important day.

I can't oversleep, no matter what.

16

On Fire for Jesus

I
oversleep.

Groggy and uncomfortably hungover, I leave Brad in our tangled, sweaty bed and stumble out the door wearing my official yellow camp sweatshirt that says
GRACE-TRINITY YOUTH COUNSELOR!
Grace-Trinity's teen worship rally is happening up at Camp Wapi-Wapawee in Minnetrista.

An hour later I'm getting on a Grace-Trinity shuttle bus, leaving the church parking lot. My tongue tastes like wet kitty litter; my skin feels sandpaper. I wear dark glasses and sink as low as I can in my seat. The only other people here are a teenage boy wearing a Camp Wapi-Wapawee baseball hat and a silent, stoic, stern-faced Native American driver. As I board the bus, the driver hands me a paper satchel. I don't ask him what it is. He hands the teen, who boards after me, an identical paper satchel and the kid rips it open right there. “Is this the orientation package?” the kid asks, peering inside. The driver says nothing. “Does this have the meal plan sign-up sheet? They told me to get a meal plan sign-up sheet. Mom didn't give me lunch money. Is this it?” He digs in the bag. “Man, I gotta find that meal plan . . . Hey look, cookies!” He pulls out two large chocolate chip cookies and looks at me. “Hey!” he says. “Did you get cookies?”

I lean over so I won't throw up.

The driver says nothing. We lurch forward and I stay crouched in a ball for the entire forty-minute drive, while the teenager peppers the silent driver and me with questions, none of which receive answers. Not one. “So were lotsa kids on the earlier shuttle buses?” he asks. “Did you see any girls with long brown hair and a ring in their nose and wearing a black hat? Like a ski hat? Maybe a puffy coat too. A black one. She's got this black puffy coat. I think she's coming. She should be coming. Did you guys see anyone like her? Have you seen Camp Wapi-Wapawee? Do you know what ‘Wapi-Wapawee' means? Is that, like, Ojibwa? Someone said it was, like, Ojibwa.”

The driver turns the radio on.

Forty minutes later, and with both my eyeballs pulsing independently of each other, we pull into Camp Wapi-Wapawee's parking lot. Two totem poles loom up outside the bus and a roiling melee of screaming, shrieking teenagers swarms between them
.

Oh dear God, what have I done?

The driver parks the bus and pulls open the door. The kid scrambles up, bolts down the aisle, and sprints off the bus. Then he scrambles back onto the bus, stumbling, and jogs back to his seat, where he grabs his paper satchel. “Almost forgot the fucking cookie bag!” he says, and sprints back off. The driver's eyes flick up and study me in the rearview mirror. I sigh, achingly stand, and lumber slowly down the aisle. Nightmare, here I come.

Grace-Trinity needn't have worried about inner-city kids coming; they've poured in, and within minutes I've seen more members of minority communities than I've seen in the entire past year. The campers are much older and more sophisticated than I thought they'd be, and nobody looks that underprivileged. I wasn't expecting emaciated orphans with dirty faces and torn clothes or anything, but I also wasn't expecting so much electronic equipment, so much sparkling bling, or so many expensive sneakers. Martha Woodcock goes whipping past me with her rage counter wristwatch going
beep beep beep!

I stop in the Counselors' Headquarters Hut and guzzle down three cups of coffee. I beg one of the interns for aspirin and get three pink baby aspirins, which are the only kind allowed on the campground. Bastards. Someone gives me a name badge that says
JENNY K
. on it and an orientation package with schedules and maps other various doodads stuffed inside. I'm supposed to meet the Louises for our final rundown meeting, so I walk through the maze, an impressive construction assembled by a professional event company using all donated hay bales. Inside, the tall scratchy chambers are filled with shrieking ghosts and thick fog. The ghosts are mostly wadded-up garbage bags and ripped gauze strung on wires, but one ghost is Gordon, the church janitor. He really wanted to be a ghost in the hay maze, he lobbied for it, and the committee ladies decided to let him. In Minnesota it's never a good idea to piss off anyone with access to your boiler. I find Gordon almost immediately. He's crouched in a corner and wearing a long white sheet. He holds up two hands while screaming, “
Ayiiiieeeboooooo!
” He stops and peeks out from under his white hood.

“Pssst!”
he says. “
It's me, Gordon!
I didn't scare you, did I? I don't want to scare anybody too bad! Specially not the kids! Was that okay?”

“Perfect!” I tell him, and he gives me a big smile.

I hurry on my way. I can't find my way out, though; I have to follow a group of teens, who I think are smoking marijuana cigarettes, in order to get out. At the exit a shrouded angel of death looms overhead and a prerecorded voice urges us maze walkers to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior and to pick up a free goodie bag.

In the goodie bag are miniature liquid soap samples, mouthwash, a mini deodorant stick, a travel toothbrush, a coupon for one free Chubby Cub sub sandwich, a sparkly plastic water bottle that says
HEARTS ON FIRE
, and a T-shirt that says
I'M ADDICTED . . . TO JESUS!

It's everything an indigent teen might need.

Big Louise walks up grinning. “Jen! Isn't a miracle?”

“Which miracle, Louise?”

“
Them.
So many of
them
came.” She beams.

“Who?”

“Pastor Mike said they'd come, he said they'd hear God's call and they'd come!”

“He said
who
would come, Louise? The Communists? The squirrels?”

“Them!”
She rolls her eyes at a passing group of African-American campers who are wearing colorful ski jackets.
“Those ones!”
she whispers.

Oh sweet Jesus
.
I roll my eyes at her, which is painful but unavoidable whenever Big Louise is nearby.

“
Louise! Stop!
Do not refer to
anyone
as ‘them' or ‘those ones' . . . okay?”

“Why not? I didn't—”

“Because it sounds awful, Louise!”

“Well, I didn't call them
black.
”

We're late to meet Dirty Louise in the mess hall, and we make our way slowly through the thronging crowds of semi-wild and mostly screaming teens. Of course, all these inner-city kids came because
Jesus
called them. Not because it's an all-expenses-paid vacation away from their schools and parents, complete with free transportation from and to the city, a hospitality tepee loaded with beanbag chairs, free popcorn, big goodie bags, and a “Chillaxing Zone” where a live DJ spins big beats all day. No way.
It was Jesus.

I follow Big Louise's ample rump to the mess hall. We round the corner and I let out a yelp. Not at the mess hall, a large log cabin building overlooking icy Lake Minnetonka, but at the massive wooden structure below, on the snow-crusted beach. It's an enormous wooden cross. Taller than most of the pine trees and I'm sure easily seen from the highway or across the lake and probably outer space. That is some scary-looking cross. You could crucify a small apartment building on that thing . . . or a tall semi truck standing up on one end. “
Jesus,
” I whisper, but Big Louise is gone. She didn't even stop to look; she barreled ahead and is now just disappearing into the tall-timbered entrance of the log cabin mess hall. I hurry to catch up with her.

Inside the mess hall, there are long rows of split-log picnic tables covered by red-check tablecloths and crowned by large stainless steel condiment holders. An empty salad bar with smudgy sneeze guards banks one wall and a long buffet table filled with empty chafing dishes and stacked trays banks the other. “Halloooo there!” Dirty Louise calls over to us. She's sitting at a log table on the other side of the room, with a cup of coffee.

“Any more of that?” I ask, and she says there's a pot in the kitchen.

In the cramped, greasy kitchen, where some beleaguered kitchen crew slops out two hundred meals a day, I find the coffeemaker and pour myself a cup. As I pour some cream in my cup and stir, I read the smeary dry-erase board next to the stove, heralding tonight's dinner menu:

 

Chicken patties & fish fingers

Tater tot hotdish, sweet peas

Brownies & vanilla ice cream

Choice of milk

 

My eye catches the stainless steel shelf above the stove, which is crowded with economy-size bottles of seasonings and spices. There, tucked between the paprika and taco seasoning, I spy the unmistakable label of a Johnnie Walker whiskey bottle. Must be the cook's.

Who can blame him? I'd drink too if I worked here.

In the other room, Big Louise lets out a loud snorting cackle and that's when it hits me: the only thing that might ease my hangover is the hair of the dog. I quickly look around and then grab the whiskey from the shelf, splashing a dollop in my coffee.

At the table we get to work. The Louises both shuffle around their various activity schedules and church bulletins and camp memos; they plot out and replan their detailed tasks for the big bonfire tonight, which they're having despite the frigid weather. My stalwart Bonfire Committee did a super-fine and extra-anal job ensuring the campers' comfort at tonight's bonfire. The ladies organized forty extra cords of wood to be brought in and set up hay bales close to the fire pit so these inner-city orchids wouldn't flee just because of chilly weather.

The Louises still have doubts—and plenty of them. Big Louise is leading a Christian sing-along tonight and she's worried about wolves, errant bonfire sparks lighting her on fire, and the possibility of her sheet music being carried away in an arctic wind. Dirty Louise is telling campfire stories and she's worried about her speaking voice, her spinal posture, and if her decision to blend secular campfire stories with Christian-values tales was misguided. What if she put too much secular into the mix? What if her story causes teen fornication? Then Dirty Louise looks at me and asks if my show's all ready to go.

“Show?”
I smile sweetly. “What show?”

Apparently I was in charge of the big bonfire talent show. I didn't even know we were
having
a talent show, much less that I was in charge of it. I show no sign of panic and tell them I'm
completely
ready. Meanwhile, cold hard panic sets in. If Mother Keller finds out I screwed up at the helm of my committee, she'll have a freaking field day with it! “Oh, and Jennifer,” Dirty Louise says, “I'm so sorry about forgetting to put the sign-up sheet in your talent show info pack. I hope it wasn't too much trouble to make one. Your mother-in-law said it wouldn't be a problem.”

“What?” I look at her. “My mother-in-law?”

“I gave her the info pack to give you. She gave it to you, right?”

My eye twitches slightly. I take a deep sip of coffee. “Oh, she gave it to me, all right.”

The Louises start chattering about something else as my brain starts to wildly swirl.

My mother-in-law?
Of course!

That witch
knew
I was supposed to organize the talent show and she deliberately didn't tell me to sabotage me! Unbelievable . . . and evil. What proof do I have that she never gave me the info pack? She'll just say that she did. She's probably already planted the damn thing in my house somewhere! I can't fail at this . . . I have to make my marriage work. I can't give Brad any reason to think I can fail! I jump up from the table, nearly knocking over my coffee cup.

“What time is it?” I ask, gathering my things.

“Why?”

“I have a . . . rehearsal.”

“A rehearsal?” Big Louise frowns. “Right now?”

“Yep, right now! Five minutes ago, actually! Kids wanted to do a run-through before the big show.”

Louise creases her forehead. “But we haven't even—”

“All right then, ladies,” I say. “You're doing great! Thank you . . . see you all tonight at the show!” I take off quick-walking out the door. Then I pop my head back in. “Um . . . what time is it again?” I smile at them. “The um . . . bonfire?”

“Six o'clock,” Big Louise says, arching an eyebrow.

I wave good-bye and then say, “I forgot something in the kitchen!” and I dash into the kitchen, grab the bottle of whiskey, and shove it in my bag.
Sorry, kitchen staff, bad break. You're gonna be pissed when you find your whiskey is gone . . . but you should see how bad the kitchen crew on Saint John has it.
I nearly sprint out of the mess hall. I wind up speed-walking around in circles through the campground, with no idea where I'm going
.

What do I do now? Where do I go? Who can help me? I'm screwed!
Totally screwed!
I call everyone I can think of, everyone who won't judge me . . . which is Lenny.

“Hell, just round up some a them freaky Jesus kids and slap 'em on the stage!” he says. “They all got talent-show tricks! I remember this one kid in my Sunday school class could—”

“Thanks, Lenny!”

I hang up and tell myself,
Just breathe,
relax.
I can do this. Lenny's right. All I need for a talent show is . . . talent. I just have to find some campers who do magic tricks or yodel or something and convince them to perform tonight onstage.

How hard could that be?

Very.

I quickly discover there aren't many teens willing to perform in a church youth group talent show, especially not in front of a big unruly group of inner-city kids, who will undoubtedly beat them up on the shuttle buses later. Nevertheless, I manage to convince a few campers they should publicly humiliate themselves and the acts I secure are as follows: a freshman who can belch “Yankee Doodle Dandy”; a Korean foreign-exchange student who can juggle cabbages; a girl wearing a back brace who can twirl a baton, but since her baton is at home, she'll use a canoe paddle; a chubby sixth grader who will recite a famous poem; a pale girl with dark kohl eyes who will read a short story; and some karate kids who will attempt to karate-chop a plank in half. Also the camp nurse said she could teach everyone CPR.