The Miseducation of Cameron Post (42 page)

Chapter Seventeen

A
dam 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?”