Lookaway, Lookaway (24 page)

The party at the house wound down around six and two hours later, in the Westin Hotel ballroom, the young people and a few guests in their middle years who were game, met for dancing (with Charlotte’s hottest DJ) and more drinking before the happy couple slipped up to the deluxe honeymoon chamber. This later “second” party purposefully skimmed off the oldsters, the aunts and uncles, as well as Reverend Bo and Kate, making it an exclusive blowout for Jerilyn and her sorority sisters and Skip and his fraternity brothers. Dorrie and Josh changed into their clubbing clothes and tore up the dance floor, while Duke and Jerene collapsed back at home, clinging to two strong tumblers of bourbon, their great work accomplished. Annie sat alone at a dark table in the Westin ballroom; this was
so
not her crowd. She got off her feet for a dance with the groom.

“Better treat my sister good,” she said.

“I’ve learned this about Johnston women,” he said, out of breath from his energetic champagne-fueled dance moves. “You better not cross ’em, and you better not tell ’em no.”

“Such wisdom in one so young.”

And yet men had told Annie no with some regularity in her life.

“You’re still here!” Jerilyn said, falling into the chair next to her, wedding dress still starchy and crackling.

“What time is it?” Annie scanned the wall for a clock. “Shouldn’t you be en route to the Honeymoon Suite?”

“Skip wants to make sure the Zipper—uh, the Zeta Pis all get into cabs instead of drive.”

“I got to hand it to Mom,” Annie admitted. “That was the best functioning, most beautiful wedding imaginable. Jerene Johnston can deliver the goods.”

Jerilyn nearly teared up. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? I’ll never be Mom, though, no matter how hard I work at it.”

“Hey, go upstairs and start having some children with Skip and in twenty years’ time, and a lot more practice, you’ll be better than Mom, when it comes time to micromanage
your
daughter’s wedding.”

“Did it make you a little sad, Annie, to…” Jerilyn thought better of the question; it showed in her face.

“What?”

“I mean, not to have had a big house wedding with the full deluxe Mom treatment.”

“Actually, I’d have died with this much attention, everyone whispering about how fat the bride was. No, I’m glad they never did this kind of thing for me so they could spend twice as much on you. You, Jerry, are the perfect, beautiful bride. You are worthy of such a beautiful wedding.”

Annie never said nice things so it had much more force than the last hundred well-wishers who had told Jerilyn how beautiful she was on this special day. Jerilyn let a tear escape. “I’m glad I got to do it at home. Mom said she wanted it to be the last thing people remember about the house.”

Annie smiled because she didn’t understand what Jerilyn meant. Why would it be the last thing … “Are Mom and Dad thinking of selling our house?”

Jerilyn looked a little startled. Had she said something not intended for Annie’s ears? “Um, I don’t know. I mean, Mom and Dad, now that we’re all older and out of the house, are, I think, going to sell it one day.”

That was as a blow. Sell Great-grandfather Joseph Johnston’s hundred-plus-year-old mansion on the hill, the house they built Myers Park around? Of course, Annie would put a stop to it. Maybe she would buy it from them, through an anonymous third party, and make a show of giving it back to them. Maybe she would move into it herself. Then it suddenly made sense. Of course they would sell it. How else would her parents live with her father not working? The thought of her childhood home being sold … “Any idea when they might sell it?” Annie asked lightly, so as not to scare Jerilyn off the topic.

“I guess when that housing development is finished. You know, the one near the trestle that Dad is working on with those investors. They’re going to move into a unit there. Can I ask you a question?”

Visiting Mom and Dad at some gated community, lily-white golfing condo, just over the South Carolina state line—just great.

“Annie, do you really
like
sex?”

Annie nearly knocked over her mixed drink. “Sex. Well, yes I really do like it. It will surprise most of your sorority sisters over yonder to learn that there is a taste for big girls out there and some of those admiring men are mighty adept in the sack.”

“You’ve always been popular, big or small,” she said, reaching across the litter of wedding party favors and ruins of snack plates, and patting Annie’s hand. “I
don’t
much like it,” she went on, clearly tipsy.

“Uh-oh. Maybe you shouldn’t have married Skip if, um—”

“Oh it’s better with him than anyone. We go so far back, known each other for so long that … anyway, it seems more natural with Skip. But still. Not crazy about it.”

Poor girl. Nothing but Carolina frat boys flailing away on her, after gallons of Rolling Rock. “Sex is like coffee. People are lying to say they like it at first, but in time, it grows on you—”

Then suddenly Skip and two frat brothers swept down on Jerilyn who was lifted from her chair and was carried squealing to the dance floor for the DJ’s long-awaited playing of EMF’s “Unbelievable,” some kind of Zeta Pi unofficial anthem.

Annie decided to make a discreet exit. By way of the bathroom.

While she was in there, a new crew of sorority sisters took up positions at the mirror, all high-gloss Southern girls in their twenties, fat-free, thin-waisted, beautiful swan necks and glimmering expensive salon hair. They were tired, drunk, exhausted, danced-out good-time girls but they still looked amazing, if somewhat artificial. Annie stared at herself critically. I’m just ten or so years older than these party girls, she thought, but my face sags like a forty-year-old; I will have this double chin accompanying me to the grave. Annie had a good man, a man’s man, a macho Marlboro NASCAR-loving, work-boot-wearing, construction-worker stud of a man, while these bitches went home to the frat boys they lassooed at Carolina (wearing checkered golf pants and yellow sports coats, breathing booze-breath on everyone at the country club by eleven
A.M.
), and she had it all over them. But funny how having a first-rate fellow waiting for her down on the Banks didn’t make these self-assessments optional, or any kinder.

She opened her clutch and found her lipstick. She thought about Michael from college who hadn’t been heard from or seen in fifteen years. She looked forward to this week’s meetings with Bob, Zack, Tony, and Jim, each encounter moving her a little closer to an exciting affair. Nope, Annie—Jeannette Jerene Johnston Costa Winchell Arbuthnot—was not so good at marriage. Not good in the least.

Bo

He assumed, some future day, he would be good with his own children (if he and Kate had some) but he wasn’t good with other people’s children. When he picked up infants at the church nursery, they began screaming until a woman—any woman, apparently—took the child away from Reverend Johnston. Toddlers and teenagers, pretty much the same response. Must be the preacher’s collar, which he had taken to not wearing. He was already (reportedly) too serious, too stiff, and the dour preacherman uniform made it worse. His wife Kate connected with newborns in an instant, had them gurgling and smiling. Kate who swore she didn’t even want children, naturally, a natural.

Another group of people he did badly with: older white men. He couldn’t talk sports or stock cars, what Rush or Fox News said, Republican rants and ravings; they sensed some insufficient masculine gene in him, something soft and left-leaning. Kate could charm some of the old men, but the elders in their church were professionally mean, vinegar in their blood, quarrelers, grumblers, conspirators, assassins …

Older white women he did well with. Bo was a true Southern boy that way—always polite, respectful, listening patiently to endless twaddle and tedium, gardening and Circle gossip, catalogues of bodily ailments, explicated photos of grandchildren.

Another group Bo was ashamed to admit he was clumsy with: African-Americans. He felt white-guilty around them. There were very few black students at Mecklenburg Country Day (not even for the imagined boon to the sports teams), few blacks in his hall at Duke University. Durham was a mostly black city, yet the citizens beyond the granite walls might as well, for all Bo interacted with them, have been living behind the Iron Curtain. No blacks in his seminary class at Davidson College, no blacks in his church congregation.

When out shopping or dining in Charlotte, he saw how integrated Charlotte had become: sports-bar gangs of thirty-something men watching the Panthers lose, black, white, Latin, mixed-race, the Sikh guy in the turban, the Asian guy with the Southern accent, friends from work or school or some softball league. He envied them. Being natural around black people required there being some black people to practice on, run into, socialize with, and his world had denied him this. There was the cleaning staff at the church. As with Alma, the domestic he grew up with, he was a little suspicious of all that smiling and politeness, all those
yes, Reverend
s. He felt quietly judged by black people, even the nice ones, and furthermore, given the history of the South, he thought they were entitled. Now Katie—good Lord, she was at ease with everyone!

Maybe if he had been more socially adept he would never have landed them at Stallings Presbyterian. The Charlotte Presbytery was dominated by Zephora Hainey, one of those charismatic black ladies of the Oprah template, buxom, alert, clairvoyant when dealing with people, gathering your thoughts for you before you knew what your thoughts were. In his mind, she was ten feet tall, but in reality he was a head taller than she was, Zephora, this incarnation of womanly Christian goodness.

“That Stallings church needs to be bulldozed under the sod, and the earth needs to be salted,” she said without pretense, before a bit of black preachin’ from Job: “The rabble
rise,
they cast up against me their
waaaays
of destruction.”

“Why doesn’t the presbytery just shut it down?”

“Now Reverend Johnston,” she said, taking his arm, leading him into the garden of the Presbyterian church office, trimmed hedges of yellowing holly in an ivy patch, markedly unambitious. “We’re in the business of helping and saving Presbyterian churches, not boarding them up. And if you look at our numbers, there are plenty of churches being boarded up without the presbytery going down there with our own hammer and nails. I don’t have to tell you how the mainline denominations are fading away in this country, along with quilt-making and darning socks.”

Stallings Presbyterian was short a preacher and, as in all Presbyterian churches, the congregation would decide on their own hiring, but Dr. Hainey had put his name in play, made a visit or two to some of the more reasonable ladies on the search committee and, as she knew he would, he became their leading candidate. But oh dear God, Bo thought, Stallings, N.C., and that beleaguered church …

Stallings was a rural satellite of Charlotte, right over the Mecklenburg County line, for whatever tax relief and social difference that afforded. There were still big swaths of farmland through its unaccountably serpentine town limits. Stallings in the 1970s became a middle-class suburb—ranch houses with lawns, young married folk fixing up farmhouses, storefront day cares and corner groceries, still more trees than asphalt. Then came the gated communities, the golf course, the built-overnight shopping center with the trendy food store. Carnivorous Charlotte kept growing toward Union County, panting down Stallings’s neck with a poorer mix, mobile-home parks, Hispanic enclaves with
tiendas
and check-cashing services with signs in Spanish. In the midst of all this change and upgrade was a core of rural, conservative whites who had a last redoubt in Stallings Presbyterian Church.

Bo would privately tell trusted friends that Christianity in Charlotte possessed the aesthetics of the monster truck show at the Coliseum. Home of the mega-church, the auditorium churches with ten thousand–plus congregations, their endless splitting and walkouts and cabals and firings and lawsuits. The TV ministries, harkening back to native son Billy Graham and the altar call, Heritage Village and its religion-friendly amusement park (six million visitors a year!), the enjoyable rise and fall of Praise the Lord Club “evangelebrities,” Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Bo smiled remembering that, as children, after they got home from church they raced to tune in the Bakkers’ first TV effort,
The Jim and Tammy Show,
an evangelical puppet show out of Pat Robertson’s TV mill of mediocrity, on … was it Channel 9? Bo and Annie would roll on the floor howling at the original songs screeched out by Tammy Faye, the pig puppet made out of a shampoo bottle, all urging the boys and girls on to Jesus!

“Are you children on the floor in your Sunday clothes?” their mother would cry, once discovered. “What in God’s name are you watching? Oh not these people again!”

Do you ever suppose even one human came to confess Jesus Christ as his or her Lord and Savior because of the pig puppet and Tammy Faye’s atonal warble? Bo wondered if that soul was one more soul than
he
had led to Christ.

“So you’ll go down into Babylon for me?” Zephora was saying. “You have a sober manner, which will appeal to the conservatives, but you are progressive and loving at heart, which will become known to the more liberal element and make them happy.”

“I’m not sure even God,” said Bo, half-smiling, “could make Stallings Presbyterian ‘happy.’ I’ll settle for civil.”

The 1990s saw a wave of mainline church discontent. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, all the Protestant denominations began losing trade to the big mega-churches with their razzle-dazzle TV broadcasts, more showbiz and holiday pageants, dynamic preachers with altar calls. Well, that wasn’t how Presbyterians did things anyway, but Stallings Prez started to feel stodgy to itself, and many of the congregation wanted a more active, charismatic faith.

And then Dr. Frankling, the grand old veteran minister, a year from retirement, became born-again. Oh he thought he had been born-again earlier, but that was a dry intellectual decision, not transcendence, not God’s own grace descending upon him and bowling him over. And everything changed after that. Services were more charismatic and Dr. Frankling burst into tongues when he got excited in the pulpit. Sick people were now brought to the aisles for a laying on of hands. His sermons revolved around gifts of the spirit, and a small group of men and women met with him at his house, and word drifted back that things were transpiring. Fits and seizures, transports, all-night prayer sessions in which John and Marla Rheinhart claimed to see Jesus in the room. And then one heard about the time that Satan himself tried to interrupt the proceedings and Dr. Frankling, on way too little sleep, had them running around his house stopping drains and faucets—because that’s how Satan would enter—shoving towels under cracks of doorways, taping the windows shut. You would have thought when they all came to their senses the next morning that would have occasioned some reflection but it didn’t. And after the elders and deacons (some of whom were in this faction) talked it out, they decided that Dr. Frankling maybe better retire a year early and remain a great friend and congregant of the church. But he took it as an insult and left for True Vine Pentecostal where gifts of the spirit were encouraged. His last letter to the elders had been forwarded to the Presbytery and Dr. Hainey kept it in her files. So Bo got to read it.