Corinne, p.1
Corinne, page 1
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1992
Chapter One
All the good Bible names must have been taken when Enoch Miller was born.
“Can’t we do ‘Daniel’?” his dad would have said.
And his mom would have been like, “‘Daniel’? So that people think we only go to church on Easter? We may as well name him ‘Matthew.’ Or ‘James.’ Next you’ll suggest ‘Thomas.’”
“My name is Thomas, sweetheart.”
“Your mother was Episcopalian. I rest my case.”
“What about ‘Jacob’?”
“This congregation already has three ‘Jacob’s.”
“‘Isaac’?”
“It’s a little try-hard. I’m looking for a name that’s try-really-really-hard. Like—not quite ‘Zebediah,’ but close.”
Enoch Miller.
Enoch, Enoch, Enoch.
He looked terrible in that brown suit. He’d looked terrible in it two years ago, back when it fit, and now he looked ridiculous. The pants were too short, and the buttons strained on the jacket. He should just wear it open, who was he kidding. He was built like a front door, no waist at all. Imagine a rectangle with legs, crammed into a brown suit. That’s what Enoch Miller looked like. (Enoch, Enoch.)
He was walking up the church aisle, counting people, standing up extra straight like he was doing something really important. Like, “Jesus said I was the only person who could handle this. Better give me some space.”
It wasn’t fair that the boys got jobs to do during church services. They got to take attendance and manage the audiovisual equipment. Some of them, the older boys, even got to watch the parking lot. Imagine getting to skip half the service to stand outside in the sunshine—or the rain, Corinne wouldn’t mind the rain. She’d take any job at all.
Enoch got to read the Bible sometimes. As a job. He got to stand onstage and read the selected passage for the week, before an elder led the discussion. Enoch would go up there, and another boy would come up behind him to adjust the microphone to Enoch’s height. Because that was a job, too. Microphone boy. (Enoch used to be a microphone boy; he’d graduated.)
Corinne could adjust microphones. She was able. She could read the Bible out loud. She could stand outside in the parking lot and chew gum. She could walk up and down the aisles verrrry slowly with a pencil and a notepad, mouthing the headcount to herself.
Put me in, Coach. (Where “Coach” is “Jesus.”)
Not in this lifetime, girly. (Jesus would say.)
The Sunday service was two hours long. (Tuesday and Thursday services were shorter.) Corinne was allowed to go to the bathroom twice on Sundays—but only because her family was trashy and sat in the back of the church.
The un-trashy people sat up front, and their daughters were expected to hold their water, and their sons got to hold the microphones.
Corinne’s family were serfs. Her dad was an unbeliever, and her mom was a convert, so they all bore the stink of the outside world. Her family had been coming to this church three times a week for a decade, but the word was still out on them.
Maybe they deserved it.
Because even though Corinne never broke any spoken rules, she sort of hummed over lots of unspoken ones. And her mom let her. Her mom was soft; she let the younger kids run wild, too. That’s why they all sat in the back row—because Corinne’s brothers wouldn’t stay in their seats, and they drew pictures instead of taking notes. The whole family was kind of embarrassing.
So who cared, really, if Corinne went to the bathroom twice in two hours, and if she always went to the bathroom downstairs, even though she knew you weren’t supposed to be downstairs without a reason.
“I don’t like the upstairs bathroom,” she’d tell her mother. “People can hear you flush.”
The church basement had thick, emerald-green carpeting left over from the 1970s. There were small study rooms down there, and a library, and a room for the furnace and the cleaning equipment.
If you used the downstairs bathroom, you could sit in the stall as long as you wanted. There was never a line. Sometimes Corinne would sit there so long that she peed twice. Then she’d wash her hands like a surgeon and spend a few minutes examining herself in the mirror.
She always looked bad. She was fat, and her face was broken out, and she wasn’t very good at putting on makeup—and you had to be really good at makeup to wear it to church, because it had to look like you weren’t wearing any at all.
She wore long skirts with elastic waists, and solid-colored crewneck sweaters.
The girls upstairs in the front rows wore dresses.
They had bodies for dresses. Waists that would take a zip. Arms like Seventeen magazine models—the same circumference from wrist to shoulder.
The girls upstairs had money for dresses. And matching tights. And low-heeled pumps that their mothers let them wear when they turned fourteen, but not a day earlier.
Corinne would look at herself in the downstairs bathroom mirror. She’d suck in her stomach, stick out her tongue. Pull the ends of her dishwater-blond ponytail to tighten it. (It never looked the same after you fixed it that way.) She’d pick at her nail polish (no one explicitly said that you couldn’t wear nail polish to church) and scrape at it with her teeth.
And then she’d peek into all the study rooms … The one with the green chairs that used to be upstairs before the church was remodeled. The one with the mural of Noah’s ark. The library. Corinne would walk along the bookshelves, running her fingers thump-thump-thump over the spines. She wouldn’t turn on any lights. She wasn’t supposed to be down here.
She’d peek in the furnace room, too. It smelled like store-brand Pine-Sol.
Sometimes, when she’d run out of distractions, she’d linger on the staircase, listening to the services happening on the other side of the lobby. Standing. Bouncing on the edge of a step. Making lines in the thick green carpet with the toes of her black flats.
Enoch Miller had caught her there before.
“What are you doing out here, Corinne?”
“I went to the bathroom.”
“Yeah, well, what are you doing now?”
“Standing. I had a leg cramp. What are you doing?”
“It’s my job to check the basement.”
“You must be very important. Brother Miller.”
“You’re missing services, Sister Callahan.”
“Well, you don’t miss a beat. No wonder they trust you with the basement.”
Corinne had already used the bathroom twice during today’s sermon. Once upstairs and once downstairs. And she’d already examined the back of everyone’s heads. And read her favorite scriptures …
Why couldn’t you get lost in the Bible the way you could in a book? The Bible is a book. It has stories. Pretty raunchy stories. With beheadings and floods and so much adultery. But Corinne’s eyes would glaze over every time she tried.
Her favorite passages were the lists. Especially the lists of names. She liked to say them out loud in her head. Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah. (Matthew, chapter 1.) It wasn’t all guys’ names—occasionally one of them begot a child “by” a woman. David got the verb, and Bathsheba got the preposition. (God, Enoch Miller was lucky. If his mom had read Matthew 1 as much as Corinne had, he would have been named “Rehoboam.” Or “Zerubbabel.”)
Enoch Miller was still walking down the aisle in his terrible brown suit, counting heads like Christ and the Father had anointed him for the job.
Corinne stood up and straightened her long skirt. Her mother frowned at her. “I think I’m starting my period,” Corinne mouthed. She headed for the stairs.
Chapter Two
Sunday services were supposed to be two hours long, but Brother Dawes always went over. Because he could. Because no one would stop him.
After services, people would gather in the lobby and, if the weather was nice, out on the steps. If you drove by on a Sunday morning, you’d think about what a nice place this must be, with people of every color all dressed up and smiling at each other. All the men in suits. All the women in dresses and hats and hair ribbons.
Corinne liked that view of it.
She liked the way they sounded, too, during the hymns—everyone so joyful and harmonious.
Corinne’s mom didn’t have a car, so after services, her family was at the mercy of whoever had driven them to church that day. Usually it was the Merediths, an elderly couple with a minivan. Sister Meredith liked to sign up for cleaning duty, so Corinne’s family would stay and clean, too.
It meant waiting for everyone else to leave. It meant chasing after her littlest brother, Noah, while he chased after all the other little kids. Corinne used to have to chase after both
She had a little sister, too. Holly. Holly never got into any trouble anymore. She was fourteen, and after services, she’d stand in a circle with the other girls her age, talking about all the boys their age and a little older.
The girls and boys Corinne’s age stood in a circle together on the other side of the lobby. There were more girls than boys.
More girls than boys, more women than men. At every level. Those were the breaks, demographically speaking. Boys were more likely to opt out of church as teenagers (lured off the path by girls who weren’t waiting for marriage), and women were more likely to opt in as adults.
That made boys hot property.
Even a boy like Enoch Miller, with his big nose and his ugly brown suit.
Enoch was eighteen, and a trusted servant of the Lord. He got to take attendance and read the Bible during services. Pretty soon he’d be monitoring the parking lot. He’d be an elder someday; his dad was an elder—or had been, before he died a couple years ago of cancer. Enoch Miller was going places.
Well, he wasn’t going anywhere. That was the point. That’s what made him desirable.
That’s why Shannon Frank desired him.
Shannon Frank was a bitch.
And Corinne didn’t think that just because Shannon was beautiful. Though Shannon might be a bitch because she was beautiful. Because when you looked like Shannon Frank, you could be a bitch, who even cared? (Nobody cared that Corinne was a bitch either. But that was because nobody cared about Corinne. There was a difference.)
Shannon Frank was tall and slim and wore fitted dresses from Laura Ashley, with puffed sleeves and long, full skirts. She had red patent leather pumps with bows. She had a pair of pink pumps with actual ribbons. And she wore hats sometimes in the summertime—which you’d think would look lame on a teenager. But it didn’t. She looked beautiful. She looked like someone who would be friends with Anne of Green Gables.
She was not friends with Corinne.
She never spoke to Corinne, she never had—but whenever Corinne walked by, Shannon would whisper something into one of her friends’ ears, and then they’d laugh.
Corinne had gone to a slumber party at Shannon Frank’s house in fifth grade, only because Shannon’s mother made Shannon invite every girl in the congregation. All the other girls whispered funny things to each other all night. Shannon made everyone take turns with her Barbie Dreamhouse, and Corinne never got a turn, and then Shannon put it away.
Maybe Corinne should get over it. But it was hard to get over hating people when you saw them three times a week, and they never got any better.
Shannon Frank and Enoch Miller were going steady. They went on dates with chaperones. They had each other over to their families’ houses for Bible studies. They went roller-skating with groups on weekends. They’d probably get married next year.
Corinne knew all this because her mom was close to Enoch’s mom. Sister Miller was the one who brought Corinne’s mom into the church ten years ago—she’d seen Corinne’s family at a park and offered her mom a Bible tract.
Corinne’s mom was the sort of person who was just waiting for someone to hand her a Bible tract. Gagging for it. She didn’t have any extended family, and her husband was an alcoholic. She was broke, and overwhelmed, and had three terrible kids.
Who in that situation wouldn’t want to hear some good news?
Who wouldn’t want to be part of something bigger and better and closer to God? Wouldn’t you want to come to church three times a week if everyone there loved you? If they had to love you? Because those were the rules? Couldn’t you put up with all the other rules? All the other bullshit?
(Corinne never said words like “bitch” and “bullshit” out loud. But she thought them sometimes. She thought all sorts of things.)
You couldn’t start vacuuming the church until everyone was gone. Corinne stood at the edge of the lobby with the vacuum plugged in and ready. Enoch Miller was standing with Shannon Frank and their circle on the other side of the room. Shannon leaned over and whispered something into her best friend’s ear. Enoch looked up and caught Corinne watching them. Corinne turned on the vacuum.
Chapter Three
One side effect of going to church every Tuesday and Thursday night was that you never got to see any of the good shows. Corinne only got to watch Must See TV when someone in her family was sick, or if their ride to church fell through.
On most Thursday nights, their ride would show up five to ten minutes into The Cosby Show. Corinne had watched the opening credits of The Cosby Show hundreds of times. She’d watched the Cosby kids grow up that way. But she never got to see them do anything.
“I’m a modern-day Sisyphus,” she told her mother.
“How does Jesus feel about false gods?” her mother replied.
“Sisyphus was mortal,” Corinne said. “Initially.”
Her mother was totally sincere when she talked like this. Sometimes Corinne wondered what her mother was like before she found God. Her dad said her mom used to be really into astrology and palm-reading. Corinne couldn’t imagine it. Her mom wouldn’t even say “Good luck” because luck was too close to magic. She wouldn’t let them watch The Smurfs.
Today was Thursday.
Which usually meant Corinne would take the bus home from school and have a couple of hours to herself before it was time to change into church clothes and watch the first ten minutes of The Cosby Show.
But instead she got called to the office in the middle of the afternoon.
Her mom was there to pick her up.
Chapter Four
Sister Miller was standing at the head of the table, with her head covered, because a woman had to cover her head when praying in front of a man. Even if the man was her own son.
“And thank you, Lord, for blessing us with this opportunity to support our brothers and sisters. Please help us show the Callahans how welcome they are in our home.”
Corinne opened one eye. Bonnie—Corinne didn’t have to call Enoch’s mom “Sister Miller” when they weren’t at church, she was allowed to call her “Bonnie”—had pulled folding chairs up to their dining room table. Enoch and his little brother sat in their usual chairs, with their heads bowed and their hands folded. Corinne and her siblings sat on the folding chairs, squeezed in at the corners. Her six-year-old brother, Noah, was already eating his spaghetti.
“Help us lead with love and generosity,” Bonnie said. “And please, Lord, we beg of you, help us to stand when we feel weak. Everyone at this table knows what it feels like to lose an earthly father. Let us not forget that we have a heavenly Father, who will never abandon us.”
Enoch’s fox-brown hair was hanging over his eyes, but Corinne knew what he was thinking: His father didn’t abandon him; he died of lung cancer.
Corinne’s dad maybe didn’t abandon her either … Sure, he left—but he’d left before. And he’d come back before. Her mom always took him back. Because God doesn’t recognize divorce, her mom said. (Because she wanted to take him back, Corinne knew.)
This time her dad had really made a mess of things. He’d been gone for two months, and they’d been behind on the rent even before he left. Their landlord sent the county sheriff around today to evict them.
“Where would we be,” Corinne’s mother said, when she’d sat them down to explain it, “without our brothers and sisters?”
The sheriff had given her mom two hours to clear out. Bonnie came with her station wagon, and they stuffed it with clothes. Someone else from the congregation, Brother Fiala, came by with a pickup truck and took their beds—and maybe some other things, Corinne’s mom wasn’t sure. It was all in the Fialas’ garage for now, thank the Lord.
They were going to be okay. God was looking out for them. God had sent His angels to protect them—her mother had felt their presence. Why else would Bonnie Miller have decided at the last minute not to go grocery shopping today? The angels had intervened. Bonnie was home when Corinne’s mother called—and had offered to take in their whole family. There was plenty of room in the Millers’ basement.
