Linked, and: When I Was a Preteenybopper, and: When I Was a Physicist

Linked

Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD, she shall be praised.

—Proverbs 31:30

My sister confides that she may have been in a cult for the pasttwenty-five years, that she genuinely believes her husband is nextin line to God. The word cult sputters through the airwaves betweenIllinois and Florida like the Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg blew up in Lakehurst, New Jersey, ten yearsbefore I was born, when I was still cells in the prepubescent cradlesof our mother and father, who hadn't yet met at St. Mary'sHigh, and whose parents were of different classes.

Classes like flowers or vegetables or cars or races or, perhaps,Scotch or angels. There was the ubiquitous middle and there wasthe worker bee class. My sister is the youngest in our family, makingher both of the lowest and highest class: The Baby.

The baby gets everything she wants (highest) but everyone tellsher what to do (lowest). I escaped soon after she came along in hermohawk and her chubby legs. I left home to misplace my religionand study kissing.

Kissing was a mortal sin in those days, unless sanctioned by marriage.All you have to do is look at a boy and you'll get pregnant, was awarning I heard often. So I married young, according to the customof Catholics.

Catholics believed in stuff that other Christians did not—like Mary,or like when you went to communion it was really God in yourmouth (chew, don't chew, swallow whole, digest). My sister grewhalfway up and got pregnant.

Pregnancy out of wedlock was a catastrophe. My father had a veinin his temple that pulsed when I told him (she asked me to) and Ihoped he would have a stroke and then I hoped he wouldn'tbecause I was conflicted about authority and God.

God the Father was a gray guy who drowned people, Jesus was alamb we led to slaughter then ate, and the Holy Ghost was abreeze or a tongue or a bird. My sister married a fundamentalChristian on the front lines. (Awesome! said my father).

(Fathers can be short-sighted.) She's been away in Christianity solong I almost forgot that she sounds exactly like my mother andme on the phone, or that with eight kids she is no longer, and hasnot been for a long time, anyone's baby.

Anyone can tell you a sister who goes missing in Christianity ismourned. Oh, missed for a while, but with all those lightning boltsin her husband's hands, ready to zap and fry in the name of BibleGod, she was hard to reach, a baby slipping beneath the ice.

Ice, however, is not the final word of this story. I've already decidedthat my sister will have that honor. Our father died last yearand she and I have been talking again nonstop. We say: Hello, mysister, my sister, my sister, my sister, my sister.

When I Was a Preteenybopper

I loved God first, then my (hip, boy) neighbor,Jimmy H., who lived down the hill and smelledlike toast, as myself. It was second grade or

third when we first heard the Top 10 and heldpop summits in our bucolic backyards—as the Milky Way spread its silver cold

incandescence overhead and our starvedyoung lives were mercifully fed by sound.Our parents, young themselves, had harder

faiths, from crash or bomb or some woundedcore. Post-war, pre-funk, mid-Catholic, we werenaive lovers of bass, rhythm, spellbound

by something called a beat that could clobberthe righteous right out of us if we let it.When those Billboarders crooned, my father

switched off their tunes and derided hisLittle Darlin', Earth Angel, Sh-boom,his derision no rival for cupidity.

His dogma dogged me until high schoolwhen I fell in all the ways he'd foretold,ways he...