What I Really Think of You Read online

  My father used to tell Bud he chose well, and after Bud left, my father said he hoped Bud realized what he gave up when he told Seal good-bye.

  Seal still acted like she hadn’t heard Bud right. She was always at our house, and still so taken up with ACE my father was ready to put her on staff. ACE stood for A Challenge Enterprise, our official name.

  It was our second summer on TV, our first in The Summer House.

  Even though we were almost at the tip of Long Island, on Sunday mornings traffic would pour into Seaville from as far away as New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

  The cars in our parking lot were bumper to bumper all the way back by noon, when my father’s picture came on the enormous screen across from the balcony where he stood, and his voice thundered across the loudspeakers.

  The few hundred people who didn’t watch him in their cars had to be in their seats in The Summer House by ten-thirty, long before the TV crew arrived. Everyone drew lots before they climbed the steps up to The Summer House, to see who would be among the lucky dozen to be televised shaking his hand after.

  Winters, my father wrote and lectured and traveled around the country with The Challenge Choir, staging Winning Rallies.

  Even though I looked like my father (and enough like Bud to be his shorter twin), I was a somnambulant version of him—that’s what my father called me. According to him, the “him” in me had not been awakened yet. He claimed I still made wishes instead of plans, and said if I didn’t decide what I wanted to be, it might be too late when I got around to it.

  Bud was the chip off the old block before he split. He was the follower in my father’s footsteps, go-getter, ball of fire. Bud and Seal had all sorts of plans for when Bud would become a preacher. Seal had his same kind of energy and enthusiasm, and like Bud she was tall and blond, and people turned around for a second look. She had green eyes that sparkled and a way of moving that was quick and graceful, and she always seemed to be excited about something—Bud used to tell her she was filled with schemes and dreams, and chuck her under the chin with his thumb until she’d protest, “Listen to me! I’m serious!”

  “Well, then, you be the preacher,” he’d say. “You’re the one with the business head, and your daddy could buy you a church!”

  Right before Bud cut out he said things like that to Seal a lot. He’d go after our father, too, accusing him of turning religion into big business.

  “It is big business,” my father’d answer.

  Bud would mutter, “Then count me out.”

  “Should the Lord’s work be some two-bit operation?” My father.

  Bud would shout back that there was a limit, then he’d storm out of the house and my father’d say he was probably going to cool off over in the von Hennigs’ big swimming pool.

  Bud claimed my father would sit down and listen to any idea a von Hennig had, but I think what he was really steamed about was that Seal’s ideas were good ones. Bud couldn’t stand not being the star. Since I could remember, he always wanted to be in the center of the room. That was hard around Seal.

  That Sunday morning Seal was excited about a way to improve our “Personality Segment.”

  We called it the P.S.

  It was a five-minute segment which featured someone who’d overcome adversity. Most of the time my father’s staff found someone from the mailbag, who’d written in for one of the charms he gave away periodically. It could be a gold ladder, or a gold C for Challenge, a gold star (“Shine and twinkle!”), or, as it was that Sunday, a gold nutshell with a crack in it (“If you don’t crack the shell, you can’t eat the nut” was his morning message).

  Often the people who wrote in for the charms had inspiring stories. My father would send an ACE scout to interview them. If the scout found a likely candidate, my father would ship whoever it was into Seaville for the P.S.

  “Jesse, I just thought of an idea!” Seal said. “Do you know Opal Ringer? Her father runs The Helping Hand Tabernacle?” She didn’t wait for my answer but got to her feet, pulling her long hair back from her face. “Opal and her mother work for us, and last night Arnelle said they’re having a healing this afternoon!”

  I was watching the end of the P.S. on TV. A heroin addict from Atlanta, Georgia, had just told how he kicked his habit when he became a Born-Again Christian. The choir was starting to sing “What a Difference You’ve Made in My Life.”

  I could hear the car motors turn over out in the lot. A lot of our auto viewers didn’t wait for the Glory Be, to get started ahead of the traffic.

  “Jesse, what about getting someone from right here in Seaville for the P.S.? What about getting someone who’s been healed?”

  “Have you ever been to one of those things, Seal?”

  “It’s a really neat idea! Your father’s always saying he wants to do more for the local churches!”

  She didn’t answer my question; she didn’t have to. Seal always went to church where the floors were carpeted and the kneeling benches padded.

  “It’s a super idea!” she congratulated herself.

  I felt like telling her to knock it off—Bud was finished with her, and nothing she could do for ACE would change that. He’d told me himself the thing with Seal had ended for him; he pinpointed the ending to an evening when she’d stopped him in the middle of this long, passionate kiss to tell him about some new idea she had for “telephone tithing.”

  I began to get that ache in my gut that came when I watched Seal and realized she never saw me. She looked at me but I wasn’t there: Bud’s brother was.

  She was hopping around the room now in her stocking feet and jeans and T-shirt, telling me of course I knew who Opal Ringer was when I didn’t, going on and on the way Seal did.

  I was wondering why we couldn’t just roll up our jeans around our ankles and run down to the beach, along the surf, hand in hand, and talk about something simple like who did what at school, laughing and forgetting everything back at ACE.

  I was always wondering things like that, missing being something like a plumber’s son or the son of a lawyer, or anything but a preacher’s kid. We could never just roll around on the floor with the comics Sunday mornings and let the world go by.

  “Seal?” I said. “Why don’t we just roll up our jeans and—”

  “Shhh! Jesse.”

  My father’s face appeared bigger than life on the TV, and his voice echoed from the loudspeakers outside. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and—”

  I sighed and held my chin with my hands, while Seal stood as still as she could and still be Seal, shut her eyes, bowed her head.

  “Amen!” my father said.

  “Jesse?” Seal said, coming across to me and throwing herself across my lap. “You want to go for a ride?”

  “Hey! What’re you doing?”

  She mussed up my hair with her long fingers.

  “What’re you doing, Seal?”

  “Getting you to go to a healing with me,” Seal said. “I’ll even let you drive.”

  Three

  OPAL RINGER

  I USED TO HATE it when anyone from your world showed up at The Hand. It wasn’t anything I ever had to worry about a lot, because those of you who did go to church went to the fancy ones along Main Street, or out to the new TV Summer House, starring Guy Pegler.

  Seaville had eight churches beside ours and one Jewish Center. All of them were on the other side of the railroad tracks from us. Even the black Baptist church was located on the good side of the tracks.

  We were down in The Hollow, a stone’s throw from the dump.

  On a hot Sunday morning when we had the doors and windows open, you could hear the gulls fighting over the garbage. When the wind blew you could smell the garbage, too.

  I’ll never forget the time Mr. Westminster brought the whole Central High social history class to The Hand. Seeing how the Holy Rollers roll, I guess, calling it studying the ways others worship or some dumb thing like that. Daddy was glad because the
offering was over three hundred dollars that Sunday. … Me, I wished I was six foot under. I felt like I was walking around in front of all of you in my underwear.

  I remember the looks on your faces. Every time somebody’d raise their palms and say, “Thank you, Jesus!” you’d give each other looks, and your mouths would start twitching. You’d pretend you were coughing behind your hands, and a couple of you couldn’t even fake it, just got to giggling.

  Every Sunday someone got slain in the spirit and fell over. Some churches had catchers, men who stood by to help the fall of whoever it was keeled over. Daddy didn’t believe in that, believed no one got hurt when the spirit of Jesus moved him or her. No one ever came up from the floor in The Hand worse off than before they fell, so maybe Daddy was onto something.

  But you all never saw anything like that in your lives. I remember it scared Sybil Younger so bad she ran down the aisle and out the back door.

  The woman who fell was Mrs. Bunch from Bunch Cleaners. She got slain in the spirit three or four times a year, and she was big, landed with a thud. Daddy always went over and stood by her and said, “Oh thank you, Jesus!” and the rest of us said it, too.

  Sometimes I said it and sometimes I didn’t, and I sure didn’t say it that Sunday morning. My face was the color of cooked beets, and I didn’t even have Mum to hide behind. She was up there with her slip showing in the front row of the choir, singing “When God Dips His Love in My Heart.”

  That Sunday afternoon before the healing, there was one of you waiting out front when we came up from lunch in the basement. On healing Sundays we always brought lunch so people didn’t have to troop home and back on the same day.

  My own personal name for Seal von Hennig was V. Chicken. She was one of them who went to Seaville High, the school kids going on to college attend.

  Before Bud Pegler ran off from home, Seal was his girl and they were the IT couple in this whole town. They had IT and they were IT, and you know how you watch a pair like them and think about what they got, what it’d be like to be them.

  I knew more about what was between them than most, I think, because I helped out at the von Hennigs’ when Mum couldn’t handle all the work herself. Mum earned extra money working there, said I didn’t do any helping out holding their lace tablecloths to my face, swooning over the way they felt against my skin, but some of the stuff the von Hennigs had over to their place I’d never seen the likes of.

  Daddy said sometimes he thought it was Satan’s doing that I loved nice things the way I did, because who’d I ever get that from? I had no real answer to that one. Seemed like I was born with that love like I was born with black hair and brown eyes: Seemed like a part of me missing, the way a body’d miss one of its arms.

  Truth is I probably got it from the von Hennigs themselves, being up there like I was when I was little, tagging after Mum from room to room in that place. You could have set our whole house down in their dining room/kitchen/pantry and have room for a Ping-Pong table besides.

  It was up to their place I got my first glimpse of Bud Pegler and her, up to their place I got to know him some. I wrote down word for word one thing Bud Pegler said to me, leaning down to say it with the grin on his face and his eyes staring into mine, his mouth so close to mine I felt his warm breath on my lips.

  “Opal, you’ve got real pretty eyes, and someday—”

  I never liked V. Chicken, even though she never personally did anything to me. She even sent down some of her clothes for me to wear. I never wanted to go up and thank her for them, so Mum made me write her thank-you notes instead. I’d complain and complain, and Daddy said to call her on the telephone if writing notes was so hard. I’d say, “I wouldn’t call her up if you paid me.”

  “Well, no good deed goes unpunished,” Daddy’d say. “Girl sends some pretty things down to you and winds up on your hate list.”

  “I don’t have no hate list.”

  “Don’t sound like you like her, Opal, and I hope the reason’s not envy.”

  Deep down I couldn’t cross off envy as the reason, but I wasn’t telling him that. Told him I didn’t have a reason, sometimes you just don’t take to someone, but I knew as well as I knew how to spell Satan I sometimes hated being a have-not. I’d have been a real good have, and not taken none of it for granted the way V. Chicken did. I didn’t think she thought twice about being a have, and I know personally from looking in her closets there was clothes on hangers with the price tags still on them, just never got around to wearing them.

  V. Chicken was her beautiful self that May morning standing out in front of The Hand. Times I was up there working, I didn’t run into her too much—seemed like she was always out. She smiled at me like we was friends or something, with this mouth of straight white teeth, wearing clothes I’d wear to clean house in, but on her it didn’t matter. She had blond hair like an angel (never saw one with black hair, which was something to think about), green eyes like emeralds, all these freckles.

  Said she, “Well, hi there, Opal! I’ve come to the healing.”

  “I thought maybe you was on your way to the dump,” I said, “except you all don’t go to the dump yourselves.”

  She laughed like I was some TV comedian and said, “I brought a friend with me. He’s parking the car.”

  Daddy and Mum and Bobby John were loading dishes and stuff from lunch into the van.

  Mum called out, “That you, Sally?”

  “It’s me, Arnelle. I’ve come to the healing.”

  “Well praise the Lord and welcome!” Mum said.

  “I got inspired by Doctor Pegler this morning, I guess.”

  Daddy said, “He’s a fine man, praise the Lord,” which was not the same thing Daddy said in the house, times he’d seen Guy Pegler on the TV. Then Daddy always said, “Can’t beat that. Can’t beat that,” meaning he was into worrying again about people thinking they could go to church right in their own living room, instead of down to some real church.

  Another thing that worried Daddy was folks who went to The Hand sending in their money to the TV preachers, instead of dropping it into the plate. Our offerings were way down, and Daddy said inflation was only half the problem.

  “It ain’t inflation,” Daddy’d say, “it’s infiltration. We are being slowly infiltrated by outsiders. They’re coming right into the living rooms on the TV.”

  “Opal?” Mum said. “You better go on in and see if there’s folks needing help. Old Mrs. Bunch is here on a walker from her rheumatism.”

  “Nice to see you, Opal,” said V. Chicken.

  The wheels were already in motion. It was the start of things, but I didn’t know that. I only knew I didn’t like her being there, coming to sightsee at The Hand.

  You could fill all the oceans in the world with what you don’t know about your own beginnings and endings. In the movies music starts tinkling, telling you something’s coming, telling you the mood is swinging you another way, warning you, preparing you, but in real life it just all comes down on you like an avalanche.

  It’d been a year since we’d had a healing. Last time the healer was a short, tubby preacher from Newark, Ohio, who took sixty percent of the collection, that was his deal. We didn’t make a hundred dollars because Daddy said he had all the charm and power of Bobby John. Daddy said he was just about as colorful as a sack of flour, and couldn’t heal a cold sore in three weeks’ time.

  This Sunday we had K. Christian Keck from out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He went fifty-fifty on the collection, had hair as red as the fires of hell, and was a crowd drawer so cars were parked as far back as the sign that said City Dump.

  When I was little, I’d worry over who’d be healed and what if nobody was, but Daddy taught me there were very few miracles that happened right on the spot. He said we weren’t to expect anyone to throw down their crutches or get up from their wheelchairs since healing was a slow process, whether the Lord was in charge or some doctor. Daddy said we only plant the healing seeds, and in
His mysterious way God does the sprouting.

  Daddy said sometimes Satan had fakes working for him, posing as men of God. He said they’d stage healings, put a well man in a wheelchair, so’s he’d jump right up after the laying on of hands, and claim he got healed.

  “Oh, healings can happen real sudden in a service,” Daddy said, “and we’ve seen it with our own eyes, but they always happen in Satan’s services.”

  “Why?”

  “They fake it so’s they get a following. Word of mouth goes like a rabbit through a forest with his fur on fire. Pretty soon it’s spread for miles and miles and Satan’s man is said to have The Power. Folks will say, ‘I saw him do it. I saw a lame man walk, he did it.’ That’s all you need.”

  Even though I’d been saved, I’d never really felt The Power, never got slain in the spirit, either.

  There was something, though, I never talked about or told anyone, and that was my dream. I’d had the dream half a dozen times since I was little, always the same.

  In it I was watching a speck, just a speck. Then in a light I could hardly look at, it was so bright, the speck would be coming into focus and getting bigger. I’d be trying to keep my eyes open against the terrible glare, to see what the speck was turning into. It’d grow and take a human form, and just before I had to shut my eyes against the brilliance of the light, I’d see myself, bigger than I was, as clear as though it was an enormous me inside a mirror. That was all. I’d wake up. I’d feel real, real good. I’d try to remember more. What was I wearing? Was I smiling? Was there something behind me? It’d all go, fall away, every detail, just when I’d almost see more. I’d lie there in the glow. There was only the glow for a while, and then the glow would go.

  Who was I going to tell that to, anyway?

  But that dream was mine, like a special secret I had, and if it had to do with the Lord, or the spirit, I didn’t know.

  I could feel the church starting to fill once I got into my seat. I got Mrs. Bunch on her walker up toward the front with me, and then I settled back. I shut my eyes awhile. I never liked to look around and try to gauge the crowd, because I hurt to see what was back there, the lame and blind, some sick in their minds so it showed in their eyes, those bent with afflictions, all of it.