As God is My Witness

Six days before my wedding, I sorted the laundry and separated my underwear from the rest of the pile. As my father had decreed, they had to be white, and reach to the knees. Only a man could have selected white as the most suitable color for the undergarments of a fertile woman, and every month, I spent hours scrubbing mine with vinegar. I knew my father knew what I was doing, and I also knew that he regarded it as his early warning system, although the state of my underwear should be none of his business. Despite my ardent prayers, I could not rid myself of such rebellious thoughts.

I carried my clothing to my bedroom. Paneled in wood, a darker wooden cross hanging above my narrow bed, a peephole carved in the door that did not lock, bars across the windows. I laid the drab collection on my bed and, checking that my father was nowhere near, pulled the bridal magazine from under my mattress. My dress was already made, by my future mother-in-law. Lace underlaid with satin, with long sleeves and a high neck. Of course, I knew Eternal Word Church would never allow me to wear a strapless wedding gown, but it was one of the increasingly frequent times I couldn’t reconcile the church’s rules with my own fantasies.

I had snatched the magazine from a pile in the dressing room at the bridal store I went to with my mother, sister, and future mother-in-law. It was the store’s own publication, featuring women who had bought their dresses in that very location. I was only there for a veil. Normally, a family member would have sewn one for me, which would have avoided this trip to a den of iniquity, but the Church was in court fighting some land use stipulations and everyone was exhausted.

The bridalwear was no longer the main thing I looked at. I liked the section where women sent in pictures of their own weddings or engagement parties. These women all lived near me, but seemed to exist on another planet. There was always a little blurb about the bride and groom and I was fascinated by the lives of the women smiling from the glossy pages. Janelle McNamara, newly engaged, was an event planner. What is that? I wondered. I was on the Eternal Word banquet committee. Would that qualify me to be an event planner? Janelle McNamara was already living with her husband-to-be in a condo developed from a restored warehouse. My father would doom her to hell for having lived in sin.

My eyes fell upon the picture of two women, both wearing white dresses – one with a huge net skirt like mine, and one in a sleeker style. My father would have a conniption if he saw that, and it had made me uncomfortable at first. But I’d had a change of heart when I read the text below the picture. Heidi Tardiff and Jane Lysack had met at their church, The Sanctuary, when they were both volunteering to serve meals to people in need. For their wedding, they hosted a feast for unhoused people at The Sanctuary. I suggested to my father that I do the same at my wedding.

“Why would I take my hard-earned money and give it to bums, Martha?” he asked. “As God is my witness, they have not been blessed with prosperity because they are wrongdoers.” I tried again with Blaine, my fiancé, but he, too, was cool to the proposal. I puzzled over the fact that sinners doomed to hell could be following the teachings of Jesus. The mysterious ways of God confounded me, as always.

***

I wore the same clothes to church that I wore every day. The white underwear. Stockings. A plain white cotton bra. Grey blouse. Black vest. Long black skirt. Flat black shoes. Long hair in a bun with a black square pinned over it. No jewelry, no makeup. When we went into town to get groceries, my father would point at the women in the parking lot. “Look at that harlot,” he would say. “Hair far too short, and those horrible red lips, and how could any decent woman go out in public in such a tight dress?”

When I was little, I shrank in fear from such women, afraid to even look at them in case their whorish ways rubbed off on me. But as I grew older, I trained myself to face my fears and meet their gaze. I read their expressions as they looked back at me. Curiosity, mostly. Sometimes, scorn and disgust. Other times, pity.

One day, I heard two women talking as they browsed the greeting card aisle.

“I want to go to Florida this winter, but Bill says he hates the heat.”

“So go without him. Maybe us girls could go, you and me and Maisie.”

These women could disagree with their husbands, travel without them. An on hot days, they could wear breathable underwear that did not cling to their moist thighs. When they went swimming, they could wear a bathing suit instead of jumping in with all their clothes on, feeling the downward pull of the heavy garments. The bodies of the women in The World were uncovered, but it was the freedom of their minds that I envied most.

***

Because Blaine and I were engaged, I was allowed to sit beside him in church. At twenty-six, I had taken longer to find a mate than many young women at Eternal Word. Though I had had a few offers, I had shrugged off those proposals with the only acceptable answer: “I do not feel that the Lord is calling me to this marriage.” I knew the men were asking me because my father was Pastor Benson, not because they loved me. And the Bible had so much to say about love. I wanted that. Patient, kind, no record of wrongs, rejoicing with the truth.

But as my twenties ticked by, I saw the other benefits to marriage and how it gave me choices: my father’s house or my husband’s house. Six days before my wedding, I realized it wasn’t a choice.

“Good morning, Martha,” Blaine said as I slid into the pew. “Six days to go.”

I made sure I was smiling as I replied, “Yes! Six days, praise God.” The ceiling fans whirred overhead, trying and failing to move the soupy air. A trickle of moisture raced down my back and wet the waistband of my underwear.

“The time can’t pass quickly enough,” Blaine muttered, giving me the look that I recognized as one of lust. I was looking forward to sex too, even as I trembled at the idea of Blaine’s flesh entering mine and the pain that new brides whispered about in the church kitchen, their eyes bright and shining.

We fell silent as the choir started singing, and then my father strode out onto the stage. “Marriage,” he announced as he searched for the best light, angled his body appropriately. “The subject for today is marriage. And not just because I’m a proud father, who will be presiding over the wedding of my youngest child in this space in just six days.” All heads turned to look at me. Blaine risked a proprietary pat to my knee and I ducked my head, knowing I must display modesty. “Also because at this moment, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the evil Pride parades are happening across this land. These people think they can defile everything we hold most sacred. But you know what the antidote is to their hatred? Love. Marriage. As God is my witness, we must cling even harder to Biblical marriage.” I saw my mother’s head bobbing in the front pew.

My mind flashed back to the smiling faces of Heidi Tardiff and Jane Lysack. I wondered what they had defiled or who they hated. I looked sideways at Blaine, and saw him nodding like my mother. A cold feeling came over me even in the stifling atmosphere. I had tried to suppress the truth, but it would not stay hidden: I no longer believed all of the teachings of Eternal Word.

***

They were waiting outside after the service, waving rainbow banners, holding signs saying LOVE IS LOVE and STOP THE HATE. Blaine put his arm around me and tried to steer me around them. I gazed covertly at them. They were clad in shorts and T-shirts, displaying an ocean of skin. I wondered what it would be like to feel the summer breeze against my knees, my wrists, the tops of my feet.

“No tax breaks for groups who hate,” the protestors chanted, surging closer. One pointed at me and shouted, “Hey! Aren’t you the one getting married?”

I looked away, but it was too late. “No wedding for hate spreading!” a voice boomed through a megaphone, and the crowd took up that chant too.

Blaine’s face was flushed and he moved his arm from around my shoulder to grip my wrist. “Come on,” he urged me, and began pulling me toward the edge of the crowd. For a second, just a precious second, I hesitated. I had seen a Bible verse painted onto one of the rainbow flags: John 15:12. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. But this was wondrous. A sense of discovery began buzzing inside me. These protestors read the Bible too. They believed in God too.

Blaine sensed something, I know he did, because he repeated, “Come on!” and yanked harder on my arm. A yelp of pain escaped my lips. The woman with the John 15 flag broke free of her group and came towards us.

“Don’t hurt her!” she said to Blaine.

His jaw tightened and he turned away from her.

“Are you OK?” the woman asked me. She wore sandals and her toes poked out, painted a sparkly purple. She smelled fruity. I could see the tops of her breasts beneath the swooping neck of her T-shirt.

I nodded. She pressed a card into my hand. I looked down at it. The Sanctuary, it said. Sanctuary. The holiest part of the church, but also a place of safety. Blaine grabbed for it, but I closed my palm over it. I had not known that card existed a second ago, but now it was the thing I had wanted most in my entire life. Blaine pulled my arm again and I trotted obediently beside him. When we were past the protestors, I pushed the card inside my sleeve. Then I said, “Oops!”

Blaine looked at me. “What?”

“I dropped that card. We need to go and look for it.”

“What for? Why do you want anything given to you by a harlot?”

“I thought I could give it to Father, and he could check them out, see if he can find any dirt on them.” The lie came out as if I had practiced it.

“Oh.” Blaine’s shoulders slumped. “Smart thinking. But I don’t think we should stop and look for it. There’s too many people over there.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “let’s just go.”

I assumed Blaine would drive me home, but when we reached the highway, he turned in the opposite direction, down a dirt road. “I need to talk to you,” he said, and I trembled. If he broke it off, I would be devastated, humiliated. But I would also be liberated.

Blaine lowered the air conditioner a notch and took a deep breath. “The nerve of those people, threatening to disrupt our wedding.”

“Do you think they’ll show up?” I kept my voice neutral, even as part of me hoped that they would.

“They all but said they will.”

“Well, then Father will hire security.”

Blaine’s shoulders relaxed against the back of his seat. “You’re OK with that?”

I hoped my heart wasn’t beating hard enough to shake the layers of fabric encasing my chest. “Why wouldn’t I be? They’re a menace.”

He puffed out his cheeks and then he laughed. “For a minute there, I thought – ”

“Thought what?”

“Never mind.” He patted my knee for the second time that day. “Pre-wedding jitters. I’m going to be so happy when you are my wife and nothing can separate us.” He turned the truck around and I felt the cardboard square shift against my wrist.

***

“Did you have any trouble with those people, Blaine?” My father paced back and forth in the living room. Two pictures blazed on the wall behind him – Jesus on the cross, with all the gore painted in full detail, and an enlarged photograph of him in the pulpit.

“We got away OK. They tried to hassle Martha,” Blaine said, as I poured him a glass of Kool-Aid. Coffee, tea and alcohol were all forbidden by Eternal Word. “But I protected her.”

“Good. Good,” my father said.

“I think they’re going to be at the wedding,” said Blaine.

“Oh, they had better not. They can seek attention and display their vulgarity somewhere else.” His eyes snapped with barely restrained glee.

He turned to me. “If these people are about, you had better stay in the house as much as you can until the wedding, Martha. I want to make sure you are safe.”

“Quite right,” my mother piped up from her rocking chair.

I nodded and sipped my Kool-Aid as my insides churned.

***

On Monday morning, Blaine went to work in the city, my father went to the church, and my mother and I did the dishes. “Martha,” she said, “you must be so excited about your wedding.”

I pushed a lock of hair behind my ears. There was no air conditioning in the kitchen. My mother and I rolled our long-sleeved blouses up to the elbows as we plunged our arms into the soapy water.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s going to be the best day of my life.” It was what the young wives said at the womens’ Bible study – it was the best day of my life. Five days to go.

“I think you are nicely prepared to run your own household,” my mother went on. “It’s going to be lonely for you with Blaine at work all day, so you know this door is always open.”

My throat felt suddenly tight and sparked with tears. I dipped a glass into the suds. Maybe what I was feeling was normal. Maybe everyone had doubts. With my father gone, it was worth a try.

“Mom,” I asked, “did you ever want more than this?”

“More than what?” The silverware jangled as she set it down and reached for another handful.

“This life. Keeping house. Cleaning up. Raising kids.”

“But what else could there be?” Her fingers scraped the bottom of the sink. “What else could I be doing?”

“Well, you could be out there.”

“Out there?” Her head jerked up, her hands splashing in the water. “You mean – The World of the flesh?”

The World of the flesh. That didn’t sound so bad. Flesh was exciting. Flesh was sex and birth and death and all the things in between.

“Why would I want to be out there?” my mother asked. “With all the heathens and harlots? Living like those godless women, having children for other people to raise, going from bed to bed?” She gripped my chin and turned it with her wet hands. “You aren’t thinking of anything like that, are you? Because you know what it would mean.”

I did know. I would be dead to my family, to everyone at Eternal Word. The fields I had played in, the river I still swam in, I would never see any of it again. I would spend Christmas, Easter, all the holidays, in a strange city, alone, or with new friends who didn’t know anything of the old me. My eyes filled. I was crazy to even contemplate it. I wrenched myself free. “Of course I know,” I said. “I would never risk that.”

“It will feel a bit lonely until your first child comes,” my mother said. “Then you will be too busy to feel anything but exhausted.” She smiled. “Oh, but that will be wonderful, won’t it?”

It had not occurred to me before that after the wedding, I would be by myself in my house all day. And my mother, too, would be alone in hers.

***

I reached under my mattress and pulled out the card for The Sanctuary. This was the place where Heidi Tardiff and Jane Lysack had been married. A place that fed the hungry and provided shelter to all who required it. The card had a phone number, but there was no chance of me calling it. If I wanted to make a phone call, I had to ask my father, and he stood beside me as I spoke.

But there was no reason to call The Sanctuary. I didn’t really want to cut all ties with my family. And I wanted to marry Blaine. I just wanted other things too. I had done well at Eternal Word School, and the teacher recommended that I take Eternal Word’s post-secondary year of study. The Church’s hope was that kids would pair up and get married during that year. But instead of falling for a young man, I fell in love with words.

“Jesus didn’t speak English, did he?” I asked in class one day.

“Sorry, Martha, what are you saying?” Pastor Morton came closer to my desk.

“Well, I’d like to know what the passage said in the original language.”

“This is not one of your godless colleges,” Pastor Morton said. “You want to ask those questions, that’s where you go. And I’m sure your father would have something to say about that.”

My classmates snickered, but my brain was ringed with circles of wonder. College. A place to ask questions.

***

Over the next five days, I tried on my wedding dress, and despite my secret disappointment with its design, my throat swelled when my mother pinned the store-bought veil onto my hair and burst into tears. In her eyes, I saw my future and my purpose.

But when my parents and I made a trip into town to get paper plates and plastic tablecloths for the wedding dinner, I found myself looking wistfully at a woman getting into a sportscar alone, carrying a briefcase. Another woman with big dangly earrings talking on her cellphone. “Look at these people,” my father said. “So self-centered, interested in nothing but their own pleasure. As God is my witness, no one out here cares about each other, not like us.” He was hitting upon my greatest fear of The World. That away from a communal setting and a foundation of faith, life would be empty, lonely. But still, I imagined myself driving a car, carrying a phone, having a job. I had three days to decide.

I was still uncertain on the morning of my wedding as I put on my white underwear and bra and the lacy wedding dress. The long sleeves were already collecting sweat as I sat in the backseat of my father’s truck clutching my bouquet of daisies. I watched everything familiar flash by my windows – the farmland where as a child I had ridden on the tractor behind my grandfather, thinking that every little girl wore these heavy black skirts. Not yet knowing that the questions fountaining through my soul would never be answered. And there was the schoolyard, where I had played with my friends. All married now, and most of them mothers who exchanged harried hellos with me in the church lobby, their babies in their arms, their husbands standing behind them tapping their feet.

As my father parked in the field behind the church, we could already hear the chants. My father slammed his hand onto the steering wheel. “Those sinners are here again!” My chest felt tight, my breaths high and sparse. Those sinners were the best chance I would have to leave. If leaving was what I wanted.

“We’ll go in through the back,” my father said.

“Blaine will be there,” my brother reminded him. He craned his neck to look through the back window. “And there are protestors there.”

“We’ll go first,” my father decided. “We’ll clear a path for Martha.”

My heart was a hammer. My father would not be holding my arm. He would not be watching me. I followed him, careful not to get mud on my white shoes. If I did walk down that aisle, if I did, I wanted everything to be perfect.

As we approached the church, I scanned the crowd. There she was, the woman who had given me the card for The Sanctuary. I stared at her a moment too long and she caught me looking. She half-smiled and started towards me. I clutched my daisies and mounted the steps. I didn’t know this woman. How could I place my future in her hands, turning from the only people who had ever loved me? I gazed at my father’s back, took another step. Then two more faces caught my attention. They were familiar, but that was impossible. A lot of the same protestors came back time after time – it must be that. I looked at them again, and I realized where I had seen them. From the glossy pages of the bridal magazine, Heidi Tardiff and Jane Lysack had stepped into my life.

“Come with us, Martha!” shouted the Sanctuary woman. I looked at her sign – Free Women Everywhere. “Martha!” she said again. She knew my name. A feeling of softness overcame the cold steel in my chest. My father said no one cared about anyone else in The World. But Heidi and Jane cared about others. They had thrown a banquet for the hungry on their wedding day. And they were here on mine, here to save me even though my father had condemned them to hell thousands of times.

The tears were already pouring down my cheeks as I stepped into the crowd. My father didn’t notice me turn my back on the church building, but my mother did. She called out, but the Sanctuary women were already hustling me towards a car as the crowd, oblivious, shouted, “No wedding for hate spreading!” There would indeed be no wedding today, and I tried not to think of Blaine, waiting and pacing at the altar. Expecting to become a man today, to take full stature in the Eternal Word community. How his jaw would clench and his lip would curl when someone – probably my father – told him. Blaine, like me, would have to learn how to be himself apart from the judgments and expectations of the people who had surrounded him for his entire life.

And now my father began running toward us, but the Sanctuary woman was already opening the passenger door and stuffing the skirts of my wedding dress through it. I turned for one last view of my father. I didn’t know what to say to him. I wasn’t sorry and I wouldn’t see him again. So I closed the door, and the driver revved the engine. I wept as I watched my father running beside the car, saw his lips form my name; the last time he would ever speak it. Saw him dwindle to nothing in the mirror. The driver passed me a box of Kleenex as she sped past the schoolhouse, the farms, the river, the houses. She said, “Martha, my name is Antonia, but I go by Toni. Back there are Heidi and Jane.”

I sniffled and tried to smile. Someday, I would tell them about the magazine, but not yet.

“What’s the first thing you’d like to do, Martha?” asked Toni.

That choice was easy. I wiped my eyes and said, “Get new underwear.”