Martha Highers

BREAKING AND ENTERING

At night as I lay in Cotton's bed I could hear the sounds of music, laughter, and slamming car doors coming from the beer joint down by the river. The road to the beer joint led past Cotton's trailer, and I could hear car tires going past on the gravel road too, and the eerie, loveless light of head lights would rake across the warped ceiling as the cars went by. The light and the sound didn't wake Cotton; he slept on beside me, a snoring, solid lump. First I would snuggle against him, then turn my back to him and burrow deeper into the dank, winy smelling sheets. Finally I must have slept.

Cotton's trailer, the other trailers around it, and the beer joint were in a part of Nashville I hadn't even known existed, down by the Cumberland River and next to the state penitentiary. The roads weren't paved, and weeds grew in the trailers' yards. Cotton's trailer backed right up to the prison's fence, and in daylight you could see the distant guard towers. This seemed amazing somehow. If I'd take the time to sit down and think about this, I was pretty certain I'd see that being here meant something.

Cotton was old. He was fifty. He was divorced and he had three kids. I long ago forgot their names, but I can still remember the way their photos looked when he pulled them out of his wallet. They were wedged in so tightly it looked like he would need tweezers, but he worked patiently until he got them out with his own thick fingers.

"This is my oldest," he said. "He's sixteen, and man--I mean, girl--can that boy ever play football!"

"Really?” I said, smiling. "What position does he play?"

"He's the quarterback. Do you know what that means?"

"Sort of," I said, to let him tell me the way he wanted.

"It means he's the star."

I was sure Cotton would think his son was the star no matter what position he played. I looked at the photo. The boy had Cotton's blond hair and his blue eyes, and his bone structure echoed something of his father's. He was a nice looking boy. Probably Cotton had been nice looking when he was young too; now his face was ruined by beer. The flesh in it sagged and his nose was covered with spidery red lines. His body was pretty much gone too, though when we were naked together I didn't think about that. I was too busy worrying then about what he would find wrong with me.

"This is my second one," said Cotton. "He gives them all a little more trouble in school than the first,” he said. "He's too much like me, I guess.” The picture was of a mild-looking boy with a smaller frame than the last one. And finally he pulled out a picture of a little girl. She looked like she might be eight.

"Now this is my sweetheart," he said. "You should see her in the summer when the sun bleaches out her hair. She always gets real tanned, and then you should see how that hair looks against her skin."

It was nice he was so proud of them. I didn't resemble Cotton, but chronologically I could have fit into that wallet. The difference was I wasn't his daughter, and I was grown up--twenty-one. I was responsible for my own decisions.

Cotton was the last in a series of men I touched. The touching had something to do with sex, and the sex had something else to do with touching that I could not describe. Cotton was a short-order cook in the restaurant where I worked as a waitress. I had my own apartment, I was working, and I was in college, though every semester my performance got dimmer and dimmer. In about a year I would graduate with some kind of degree and a C average. Then I'd get some kind of job. When I was in high school I was a straight-A student, but I didn't care about school anymore. All the professors seemed starchy and in love with their own careers and they all seemed out of touch with real people and their needs.

Partly because he was so old, the time Cotton and I spent together was pretty domestic. He'd cook steaks for us at his trailer, and we'd sit around talking while he drank beer. He had a roommate, Mike, who also cooked at the restaurant and who slept in a bedroom on the other side of the kitchen, but out of politeness, I guess, he wasn't usually there whenever I was. Once when Mike wasn't there Cotton told me that Mike had just gotten out of prison for armed robbery.

"He killed a man too,” Cotton said.

I marveled at this--not just because Mike was shy and quiet and one of the least obnoxious people at the restaurant--but because it told me something else about where I was. And Mike too. Here he was, out of prison, but he was backed up next to it in this trailer and within view.

The next time Mike was at the trailer I looked at him to see if there was anything about him that looked like an ex-con. Maybe his arms. He was a little man, smaller than me, but his arms were hard and muscled. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and his biceps bulged beneath the sleeves. The bottom half of a blue naked woman lay on the arm. The loudness of her body contrasted with Mike's quietness. He had small brown eyes. He wore glasses.

We all sat around for a few minutes and shot the breeze. Cotton offered Mike a beer, but he declined. He sat on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, with his arms propped on his knees. He told us about the job he had had before coming to work at the restaurant. He had sold knives door to door. Once he had knocked on the door of a house in Priest Lake Subdivision--that was near my mother's house--and a woman had answered the door wearing nothing but a bright pink see-through negligee.

"She was good looking too,” he said. "You could see everything.” He swallowed.

We all three just sat there, sharing the fantasy with him. The quiet little man on parole from prison with his suitcase full of knives, standing politely on the doorstep of the woman who stood there nearly naked, saying "No, thank you.” He'd just gone on to the next house. It seemed to be a story about still being in prison. That was the kind of thing I never heard from any of my professors, anything that showed them as vulnerable. After that Mike said he had to go somewhere. He shrugged on his jacket and left.

As for Cotton himself, he had no ambitions, no expectations--except for his kids--and no future. He was just a safe person I could always go see because he was always there. I gave up doing that though not long after this story ends, and I never went to his trailer again. I don't know what happened to him. I think he might have died.

My mother had wanted me to become a Christian for a long time. When I was little she used to read Bible stories to me and my brother. She read to us from an illustrated children's Bible, and one picture, I remember, showed Jesus standing in front of a house and knocking on the door. Beyond him and the house the sun was setting, but the door was shut, and no face looked out of the window. Maybe Jesus had been standing there all day. I reached out and touched the hem of his robe. I moved my hand up to his face and touched it too, but it was as cool as the rest of the picture on the page.

"That is how Jesus is,” my mother said. "He never forces his way in. He always waits for you to answer."

"I love Jesus,” I said. "I wouldn't let him stand outside. I would open the door and let him in."

Now I didn't believe in that kind of conversion experience though, and I had suspected it for a long time. When I went to my mother's house now she was harried, distracted, lost in God. It had been three years since my father had died, three and a half since my family moved to Nashville, and the house was still full of boxes unpacked from the move. My mother would get to them, she said. Don't bother them for now, don't touch. She was hurrying between them, trying to get ready for church, or to run an errand for a friend, or to go help someone. Most of her friends were old, people she met up and down the road and took to church. Usually some of them were at the house when I went.

"You need to work on your spiritual life,” my mother would tell me. "You need to have a personal relationship with Jesus."

"Okay, Mom,” I would say. "Sure."

In the living room Chuck slumped in one of my mother's chairs and stared at his hands. He lived in a basement apartment up the road. He was 80. Next to him Leona rocked back and forth in her chair and clawed the air with her bony hands and laughed. She had red spiky fingernails and dyed orange hair. She was eighty too. She rocked back and forth and laughed at one of her own jokes and a nasal laugh sawed in and out of her bony white nose. Out the window I could see another one of Momma's friend's, Mrs. Graf, limping up the walk too. The phone was ringing. I left the house. I went to work. I went to apartment. I went to class. I went somewhere.

As my mother described it, the way you become a Christian is this: you close your eyes, you think of God, you imagine Jesus is his son, and you say these magic words: Jesus, I believe. After you do this, once you become a Christian, this is how you conduct your life: your life becomes a continual internal dialogue with God in which you pray and you attempt to follow his directions. Many, but not all, of these directions are written down in the Bible.

But it all seemed to me a kind of emotional breaking and entering.

So for a long time I resisted it. And I shunned a set of rules which I believed would only set me up for hypocrisy and failure.

But I changed.

This was Nashville, this was the 1970's. In parks, in bathrooms, in parking lots Jesus freaks approached me. I drove to Centennial Park and sat on the steps of the Parthenon. A fuzzy headed man came to me and dropped a pamphlet in my hand.

"Did you know the Bible says that for God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, and whosoever believes in him will have eternal life?"

"Yes,” I said. "I did know that."

"You couldn't do anything more important than that. Would you like for us to pray together now?"

"No,” I said. "I'll wait."

I drove to a department store. In the parking lot a young man came up to me without introduction.

"Did you know the Bible says, 'What does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'" he said. He had blank, God-struck eyes.

"I don't want the whole world,” I said. "I just want a pair of pantyhose."

"It's the same thing,” he said. "Think about it."

"Thank you,” I said.

I stood in front of a mirror in a women's bathroom in the college's student center washing my hands. A woman beside me said something friendly and pleasant. She said her name Patsy. In two more sentences she told me she was working for Jesus. She had been a stewardess for American Airlines before that, she said.

Her face had such a soft kind light it looked as if she had already died and her face was lit only by the reflected light of Easter lilies. Would I like to have something to drink with her in the cafeteria? She had something she wanted to show me.

Across the table from me she said, "God wants us to love him the way children love their fathers.” She was pointing with her soft hand to the words. "Look here: it says we cry out to him 'Abba! Father.'

"In Hebrew,” she said, "'Abba' means 'Daddy.'"

God and his disembodied love, I think to myself stubbornly. This is not love. Love is what we are here and love has to do with touching.

I follow a curve of images.

Cotton's face in front of mine is bright pink with lust. I am pushed back against the sink in his bathroom, and he is thrusting into me. There is a mirror beside us, and it shows our bodies. My legs are spread, and he is grunting and moving into me. I am covering my breasts with my arms, because I am afraid he will notice they are too small, but he is occupied with his own thoughts and does not notice.

I spread my legs, and my boyfriend goes into me. He is not Cotton. It is not that time. Outside the drawn curtains it is raining. It is sunny. It is snowing. It is night. The crack of outside that comes into the room is two inches wide.

The bedspread on his bed is covered with blue roses.

I spread my legs, and the doctor sticks things into me. I feel pain. Inside me the tube of the vacuum cleaner whirs. I feel my insides caving in, being sucked away. "Jesus!” I cry. "Momma!"

Above me is the face of a young black woman. Her dark eyes are insistent and kind. She is holding my hand.

"No,” she says. "Talk to me. What are you taking in school?"

She holds her voice steady, although there is a shakiness under it. Her hand or my hand is sweating. I tangle my flesh into hers.

It is night. I am at my mother's house. I am upstairs in my bed. Outside behind the house the streetlight is humming. There is a pool of light around it, and it is dim and cold. Beyond it the night is stark. The house looks the way it did the night we moved into it, a night my father was still alive.

There is someone out there. I hear him and I get out of bed and go to the window. I see him come into the pool of light. He is small and pale, his flesh has a frightening whiteness. I fear his whiteness and his eyes. He has a voice that hums with the light. He wants to come in.

"You think you can keep me out,” I hear him say. "But I'll get in."

He has knives. His voice is low and menacing and insistent. He will have his way. Panic rises in me like cold water. I want to lock the doors. I go to find my sister and pick up her small sleeping body. There is no one else in the house. The cold water rises higher, and I am awake. I am in the same house. The same light is outside.

There's somebody downstairs.

A hoarse whisper on the telephone. I am at my apartment and I have answered the phone. First I am disoriented. Is it a prank call? Then I realize it is my brother's voice. He is calling from my mother's house.

My brother is sitting on the couch in front of the police officers when I arrive. He is pale and scared. He is wearing pajamas. The police officers are armed. A pillowcase full of silverware has been dropped by the door, when the burglars had fled. Perhaps they were frightened when they heard my brother stirring upstairs, dialing on the phone. They have taken my father's army medals, some antique dueling pistols, and some jewelry.

The policemen are burly, middle-aged men. I look at them and think of them as fathers. They look strong.

"You should have been sitting on the couch with a shotgun when they broke in,” one of them tells my brother. "That way when you called us you could have said, 'Bring a hearse.'"

This could be a joke, although he delivers it flatly, matter-of-factly.

I wouldn't have wanted to shoot those men. In the way they rushed out, they seem laughable, pitiful even. They are just petty criminals.

They do not have the power to hurt me.

Three professors from my father's college are at my mother's house. There has been a car accident. My father is dead. This is real. The professors, friends of my father's, have come out to stay with my mother till morning.

The house is garish, lit up with electric light. It is still full of unpacked boxes, and my mother is rushing among them, trying to find things. She is rummaging through piles of papers, trying to find the phone numbers of relatives in distant states.

My younger brothers and my sister are there. They are children. They are standing around at the edges of the room, damp and quiet and grieving.

One of the professors has gotten diarrhea and is spending most of the night in the bathroom, but the septic tank is torn up, and the toilet won't flush properly.

I am not there. When I get home from college the next morning, the professors are gone. Only a brown smell of rottenness lingers in the house.

They never come back again.

My father's hands. They are waxy white and dead, and carefully folded on his chest. They don't look at all like his hands, that were always busy, ruddy and quick, thrust in his pockets, or jingling keys, or shaping the air as he spoke. The rest of the body in the casket could be my father--his chin just has a slightly dented, smashed in look--but his hands are horrible and strange. I want to go over to them and touch them, to cover them up in some way, or change them, but I can't bring myself to move away from the roses at the end of the casket.

I am sitting in the rain, watching my boyfriend's apartment. He said he was busy, and didn't have time to see me. He has other women now. I am alone in my body that is not enough. I sit for a long time, watching his door. It is quiet out here. I am far away in a field. It rains more and more. A groundhog comes out and looks at me.

I am downstairs at my mother's house in front of her storage closet. It smells of dust and cobwebs. Inside is a bottle of poison she keeps for spiders. I unscrew the top of the Lindane and smell its bitter smell.

I am lying on my bed and I am looking up at the ceiling. I don't want to be alive anymore.

I am a house. I am a will. I want to hold onto myself because there is something valuable there that I should never let anyone in to. Not that God idea, who would blot out my mind, take my thoughts. God the intruder, who would absorb me. But I don't want to be alive anymore. I think of Jesus. I imagine him floating, invisible, in the air, waiting for me. He has kind eyes. They look like my mother's. He will always hold me when I fall.

Jesus, I say. I believe.

I felt better, peaceful, as if I had gone through a storm. After that I went to church. I chose a church up the road from my mother's house. It wasn't my mother's church. It was a church my boyfriend's uncle went to. My boyfriend had admired his uncle. "There are good people there," he had said.

I sat in the back pew by myself and smiled at the people around me. I wondered if I stuck out, or if--somehow--I blended in. I looked at the families with little children. I admired the babies. There was a stack of white cards jutting out of a wooden pocket in the bench in front of me. I picked one up.

Are you a Christian? It asked. Next to the question were two small boxes under the words "Yes" and "No."

Yes, I checked.

Are you baptized? It asked.

Yes, I checked. Next to that I wrote in, Sort of. I wrote, Sprinkled. I knew that in this church whoever would read that would believe that you have to go down into the water to be saved.

Would you like Bible study in your home? asked the third question.

Yes, I checked.

Men came to provide me Bible study in my home the next week. There were two of them. They wore dark suits, and they had clean white hands. The Bibles they read out of had pages that were thin like tissue paper, and they turned them carefully so as not to tear them.

I have forgotten the names of these men.

"It says here on the card that you are a Christian,” the taller man said. He had a broad wrinkleless face with a pale white forehead. His dark hair matched his suit. He did most of the talking while his companion, a thin, kind-looking man, listened.

"Yes,” I said carefully. "I made that decision not long ago."

"It says in the Bible that whoever is baptized for remission of sins will have eternal life," the unwrinkled man was saying. His finger was touching the black and white surface of God's voice. The tissue paper pages whispered under his fingers when he turned them, or their sound might have been the tiny dry residue of a laugh. "Here," he said. ". . . I can show you."

"Yes,” I said. "I know."

I didn't add, I just want to be able to endure this life.

The smooth-faced man and the thin man exchanged a glance. I knew they believed that if I died before morning I would not go to heaven. I knew they wanted to save me. I know many people consider this rigid and laughable thinking, but I felt grateful that they were able to feel any concern at all.

"Would you be willing to be baptized tonight?” they asked.

"Sure,” I said.

I drove behind them in my own car up to the church. They stopped at the preacher's house next to the church to get the key. He wasn't there, he had gone to the hospital to visit someone, but the wife said she would come over to help me get ready.

Inside the church was hushed and dimly lit. I had the feeling we were thieves, stealing into some place we shouldn't be.

The taller man flipped on the light switch and led us up to a part of the church I would never go to again, even though I would attend there for about a year after that night. We went right up behind the pulpit, where only the preacher and the men who conducted the service stood on Sundays. We were up on a little platform. Out in front of us rows of empty pews looked back at us, silent and obedient.

There was a curtain in the wall behind the pulpit, and one of the men drew it back. Behind it was a little pool, like a deep bathtub, and it had water in it.

I walked off to a side room with the preacher's wife, and she helped me slip off my clothes and put on a white robe that looked like a choir robe, or something you might wear for a graduation. Then I walked back out of the room and stood at the edge of the pool.

There were little steps going down into it, and the broad-faced man was already there. He had put on rubber hip boots over his suit pants--the boots were the kind you might wear to work in a septic tank--and he had taken off his suit jacket, but he still had on his white shirt and tie. He had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. The stark, artificial lights were shining down on us, and I was struck by how proper everything looked, even with water right there in the middle of that place. How controlled.

I was barefoot. I waded slowly down the steps into the pool. The water parted and closed around me without complaint. When I stood at the bottom of the pool, the water came to my waist, and the gown floated up around me like huge quiet petals.

"Do you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God?” the man asked me.

I thought of Jesus. His beautiful, broken hands.

"Yes I do," I said.

"I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he said. He put one hand under my neck, and one hand holding a cloth over my nose and my mouth, and he pushed me under.

They told me I was a new person, and the next day I drove around thinking about how I'd changed. I wondered how I would be able to live without touching, but I guessed God would give me strength. I thought about priests and nuns and other people who give their lives to Jesus so completely they never need anyone else to hold them. How do they do that, I wondered? Maybe they don't need it because when they pray they can feel God's hands underneath everything, holding up the whole world. All day I listened with my body for God's hands.

I went to my mother's house to tell her what I had done.

"I'm a Christian now,” I said. "I made the decision and told Jesus I believe in him. I got baptized."

"I'm really glad to hear that," my mother said. "From now on, you just need to pray to the Lord every day and let the Lord lead in your life. The Christian life is a great adventure. I am really happy for you."

She had some errands to run, she said, she had to take some of her old friends to her own church, so she gave me a quick hug and left. I wondered if I would ever be saved enough to be really close to her.

I drove to class at college. It was a political science class at Vanderbilt. I didn't know anyone else in the class because I had missed about a third of the classes that semester. Most of the students in the class were rich. I could tell they were rich by the way they dressed and also by how they laughed when the professor said, "At any given time, twenty percent of the people in the country don't know who the president is.” It was a well-oiled laugh and a collective laugh. The laugh was about how ignorant so many people are and contained satisfaction that they were not among that number.

Outside in the sunshine I got in my car and drove till I felt the asphalt turned to gravel. When I got to Cotton's trailer I knocked on his door, but he didn't answer. I could see him through the door's window though. He was stretched out on the couch. I knocked on the window, but he didn't move.

I went around behind the trailer and looked for a window. There was only one, way up high near the top. I couldn't reach it, but I looked around. Near the prison's fence some concrete blocks were scattered and I gathered up a couple of them and stacked them up so I could climb up on them. The window wasn't locked, and I slid it open and hoisted myself up. I took me awhile to squeeze my way in, and I was glad I was behind the trailer so no one could see me, except of course the prisoners and the guards in the state prison behind me, and God.

Inside there was the smell of beer, and several empty cans were scattered around on the floor. I went over to Cotton and touched him and he made a snorting kind of snore and twitched in his sleep. I was so glad he wasn't dead that I realized I do want people to live forever.

"Wake up, Cotton,” I said. I knelt beside him and slipped my arms around him and held him. He still didn't move and I moved my hands along his clothes and unfastened them and kissed him. I touched him as if every part of him were sacred. I touched him as if there is no difference between body and soul.

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