Amber Burke | Issue 1.13
I watch the red and sweaty late-night preachers wipe their brows, hoist their heavy Bibles up, wrestle invisible demons down, roll on the floor, do push-ups, kiss the carpet, leap to their feet, pound on the pulpit, raise their arms heavenward in victorious Vs. “Glory be,” “Let there be,” and, “If your heart be,” they croon in the subjunctive tense of holy possibility. I watch the infomercials for the abdominal wheels that roll you out into prostrations, the belts that make your flesh shake and tremble, the diet pills that miraculously obliterate hunger—all radiant with the testimonials of rewarded believers, smiling and fit. I want to believe.
“Congratulations. You’ve taken the first step and admitted there’s a great, gaping void at the very core of your being,” a familiar voice says. I don’t remember if I called the TV church or diet-pill place.
“Not you again,” says the voice. “Find someone else to yammer to about your mother.”
It was the church, I’m almost sure.
—
My mother was a believer in Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, and the other thing she believed in was health. At thirteen, I, her only son, was a source of some disappointment. Yes, I went to worship with her every Sunday, sat there for hours, pretended to listen, even pretended to sing, allowed myself to be slapped on the forehead and fall backward like a board, but I was larger-bodied, as they say now but didn’t say then—this was the mid-nineties—and behind me, four grown men waited, in some trepidation, to catch me. It gave my mother no solace that I was hardly alone. In our community—a small one I will not disrupt by naming, its infamy having only recently died down—there was an overlap between believers and those whose earthly bodies were on the fleshier side.
Mom herself was conspicuous in her svelteness. Her hair, blond, crisp, and bountiful, kept the eighties alive. Her thin, tan face was too lined for her years, but she had bright blue eyes that she emphasized with globs of the blackest mascara. She wore tight clothes to church, and once, I overheard Pastor Ben say her clothes may be unforgiving, but fortunately, she did not happen to need forgiveness in those particular areas. He often called her up for healings, and she shook at his touch so ecstatically that everyone else stared while I looked away.
My mom was a waitress at a popular steakhouse, and Pastor Ben a defrocked Catholic priest who’d reinvented himself as a pastor. Our small church, bought from the Baptists, was hung about with stations of the cross, and if Pastor Ben believed in the value of confessing, he also believed in the gift of tongues, continuous revelation, and a pretribulational Rapture. Pastor Ben liked to see himself as being on the vanguard of something, and I think it was because of his encouragement that she came home from Bible Study one Wednesday night with an idea to fuse her passions.
—
Jesus Fat Camp got a dozen enrollees fast, all boys, and I was one of these initial apostles. Mom signed me up without asking me—in our hybridized religion, free will was not much valued—but I was happy to go, because she would be there.
Jesus Christ himself fasted for forty days in the wilderness, Pastor Ben said, and so Jesus Fat Camp would be exactly that length, though it was not in the wilderness. It took place in an unairconditioned elementary school that was empty during the summer months, except when it was used for Sunday school. On our first day, we flabby-armed boys huffed and puffed as we moved the desks out of the second-grade classroom to make room for our sleeping bags, and Pastor Ben and my mom locked the playground gates to keep outsiders out and keep us in. The weeks that followed were a blur that fast became blurrier, so about five years later, when I went on that talk show to defend my mother, I made the following notes:
Food: Like Communion wafers. Thin, airy, tasteless, pale. Not so different from any of the unsatisfying dinners Mom made, really, and left for me on the counter to eat alone when she went to work at the steakhouse, where she ate the staff meal.
Exercise: Mainly, “Stations of the Cross,” which my mom called “Crossfit.” (It bore no relationship to the secular exercise that has since become popular, though it was set up in the school gym.) At each of the twelve stations stood a mirror, a placard of a very thin Jesus Christ suffering in a way we were meant to emulate, and a large wooden cross made from old railroad ties; the crosses were very heavy, and we had to hoist them onto our backs and drag them around. Mom’s whistle, Mom’s voice like a whistle.
Sundays: The day of our ascension. After worship, while Sunday schoolers took over our camp, we climbed something. If it was raining, we climbed to the top of the church steeple and back down while Pastor Ben played “Stairway to Heaven,” inexpertly on his guitar, trying, I think, to impress my mother. Most Sundays, we took a field trip in the church bus to a steep hill, up which we all carried two concrete bricks. When we came back down, we had to throw them on the ground hard enough to break them.
Camaraderie: Remarkable. I have never felt anything like it since, perhaps because we boys were so full of purpose, or so united in our suffering that our suffering was less. (I fondly remember the “Rapture-me-now” cracks we made while we climbed.)
Confession: Nightly. We confessed to Pastor Ben the great decadences of our pre-camp lives, reliving, as we confessed, the taste and texture of hamburgers, of pizza, of tacos. (Many a night, in my sleeping bag on the linoleum, it seemed I smelled these things; longing-born smells wafted in like incense.) We did not confess the candy we had foresightedly bribed the Sunday schoolers to smuggle in for us, but a Judas among us told on us and foiled our plot. This was probably for the best, since. . . .
—
After forty days, we emerged, eyes burning with hunger and piety. We twelve successful graduates became advertisements; Mom’s religious slimming camps enlarged every summer until one year, my senior year in high school, a zealous camper attempted to give himself a stigmata with a rusty nail and had to go to the hospital. That’s when the police got involved. That children were being starved and crucified was a gross exaggeration, or so I believe.
I visited my mother in jail, an old-time barred cell attached to the police station. In that hard place, which was sharp with shadows and the eye-burning smell of bleach, Mom seemed softer and more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her. The officers down the hall at their desks seemed not to view her as a threat; no one stopped her from reaching her slender arm through the bars to hold my hand. It seemed to me she could have slipped her whole slim body right between the bars; she could have gotten out if she’d wanted to. It hurt me that she didn’t.
She refused to get a lawyer, and nothing I said could convince her otherwise. She pled not guilty but did not defend herself in front of the judge and jury. I don’t know if her limpness had to do with the disappearance of Pastor Ben, who’d gone on the lam, or if it was a compassionate self-sacrifice for a town that clearly needed to hold someone accountable for things there was no accounting for.
The trial came to national attention. It had everything: God, suffering children, Mom’s beleaguered beauty. Her gaunt face graced front pages, her eyes a resigned blue, her eyelashes like sticky black thorns. On TV, my fellow campers—many of whom I’d considered my closest friends until I saw them on screen—excoriated her, detailing her cruelties toward one boy in particular, who, in their telling, had come near death. It was because of their public accusations that I agreed to be interviewed.
—
“That summer was a hot one, wasn’t it? And your mother made you run more laps than the rest of the boys.” I didn’t know how we got from the weather to me so quickly, didn’t know how the talk-show host knew what she knew. Her intent eyes seemed as hot as the stage lights; my face burned; beads of sweat rose from my pores. I looked down at my notes and found no salvation in them.
The host held up a tabloid with a headline I hadn’t seen yet: “Weight-Loss Priest and Priestess Ordered Lavish Meals Every Night After Sending Hungry Boys to Bed.”
“Receipts from a burger joint, a pizzeria, a Mexican restaurant. Sounds like your mother and Pastor Ben didn’t practice what they preached.”
“They didn’t need to,” I said, but I felt like I’d been slugged in the belly. I didn’t know Mom had been eating without me.
“She ate real meals but served starvation rations. You got even less than that.”
How to explain that I had reached a depth of hunger at which I was no longer hungry, that some nights I didn’t even eat what was offered, that I was amazed by how quickly my spirit was burning through my flesh, that I wanted to see what would happen next?
“She withheld water. And when you passed out, you got no medical attention. You almost died.”
It was only my interviewer’s face, the victory in it, that made me realize I’d said yes, yes, yes, that I’d agreed with it all. “But,” I began, that’s not what mattered, I wanted to say. Useless: to the host, to everyone in the sympathetic, horrified studio audience, it was what mattered; I had sealed my mother’s fate. Mumbling desperate apologies, I unclipped my microphone and staggered off the set, my knees bending more and more as I got closer to the dressing room, where I collapsed into the chair in front of the lit-up mirror, lowered my head into my hands and prayed for deliverance. I was again the weak boy who ran lap after lap around the tracks hoping vainly to please his mother. One, yes, hot day, as I was running by myself while everyone else ate dinner—only because I was the slowest runner and hadn’t yet finished the assigned number—I saw angels on the other side of the fence: wide, white things, that attenuated, that aetherized, before my eyes until they were reedy as spears, until they were spears of spirit that came hurtling at me through the crisscrossing diagonals of the chain link, struck me in the heart, and cast me down to the blacktop on my bony back.
My mother’s steps as she ran toward me, my mother hoisting me half onto her lap—I’d grown tall over the summer, and I overpoured her legs—my mother saying, “Wake up, my big boy!” and pressing a wet washcloth to my lips, that’s what I remember most, that and feeling no shame, and, in its absence, realizing how much shame I’d felt before: for the fast-food meals and king-sized candy bars I had eaten in secret and to excess over the years, as if possessed, for never quite managing to believe in God, for never feeling, at my own futile healings, what my mother seemed to feel, for my jealousy of her faith, for my doubt in her faith. I was not even ashamed for loving her as much as I still did, for wanting to lie on her lap, just as I was doing, forever. I looked up at the sun—I think it was the sun, though it seemed not to move for days and days—and I had no fear of dying. I knew then, the way prophets who lived on honey and locusts knew things, that there was a Heaven, and I was ready for it; my mother had made me ready. I had never felt closer to anything.
Now nothing feels farther away, except perhaps my mother.
—
After my mother’s conviction, I moved north to the largest city I could find. I wanted it to hide me from my betrayal of my mother on national television, hide me from my mother’s terrible forgiveness, which she’s conveyed to me in letters I don’t answer. My one solace is that she doesn’t seem miserable in prison; she spends her time working out and praying, much as she’d done “on the outside,” though now she mentions the Rapture with more urgency than before, as if it’s just around the corner.
I seldom go out. It’s always cold, and in the mirrored windows of the towering skyscrapers, I see my lean and guilty face. I’m not the only one who thinks I look suspicious. My own doorman doesn’t like to let me in or give me my mail, even when my name’s right on the box.
“Tell me what’s in it,” he says. A test.
“It’s a vibrating belt,” I say. His eyebrows lift. I clarify, “It slims the abdomen.”
“What for? You lose any more weight, there’ll be nothing left.”
“Not for me. It’s a gift,” I lie.
Lying down in my apartment, I shake in the belt’s tight embrace. My teeth jitter, not unpleasantly, and so do the walls. I hope the battery never dies; I want to shake for hours, for days, for years, until I lose what I once lost or find what I once found, until everything shakes, until this building falls on me, brick by brick, and the world falls in on itself, and up out of it, we light ones rise into the air, the way you always knew we would, the way you always wanted us to. And once my snow-blind eyes adjust, I’ll find you, Mother. I’ll see you sitting at the banquet table in the clouds, and you’ll see me and stand up and open your arms wide, and I’ll run to you faster than I ever could when I was alive, and at last we’ll feast together: we’ll feast together in Paradise.
—
Amber Burke is a graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at UNM-Taos. She has written over 100 articles for Yoga International, and her creative work can be found in many literary journals, including swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Flyway, Mslexia, Superstition Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Quarterly West, and on her website.
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