Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Then I’d imagine Heidi visiting me. There are no psychiatrists or deans, no boys with nice shoes or flip cashiers. Just me in my single room. She knocks on the door and says, “Open up.”

AFTER SUNDAY SCHOOL, Tia usually went outside, where she’d talk with her best friend Marcelle. They would lean against the white brick of the church, silently hoping that Morning Service would never begin. Tia had only known Marcelle since the summer, when the two had met in band camp, Tia playing the clarinet, Marcelle the trumpet. They were also the only saved students in Rutherford B. Hayes High, roaming the halls together in their ankle-length skirts, their long-sleeved ruffled blouses, while the others watched them: the other black girls who leaned sexily against lockers as though auditioning for parts in a play, the white girls who traded pocket mirrors, lipsticking themselves like four-year-olds determined to crayon one spot to a waxy patch. These were the people Tia and Marcelle gossiped about after Sunday school, but that Sunday Tia knew she was in trouble. Instead of heading outside, she searched the sanctuary, trying to get to her great-aunt Roberta before Sister Gwendolyn did.

The trouble had started in Sunday school. Tia was sitting next to Marcelle, who was reading aloud from the lesson: “God’s Special Message for Teens.”

The other girls in Sunday school had read their passages, but Tia had been gazing at the stained-glass Paul: behind his frozen image of sudden blindness and supplication, shadows passed, turning the picture of Paul dark and opaque. Marcelle had kicked Tia’s shin.

“‘God’s Special Message for Teens,’” Tia began.

“I already read that,” Marcelle whispered, tapping her pencil to a passage ten paragraphs down the page. Next to the passage was a picture of a young Jesus sitting on a grassy hill with a dreamy Nazarene look in his eyes. Marcelle leaned over Tia as if the words in Tia’s book were different and more engrossing than her own. Marcelle began to draw a cartoon bubble above Jesus’ head. Tia read the passage:

“As a teen, you may believe that no one understands your problems. You may say to yourself, ‘I’m all alone.’ But this is NOT TRUE! God understands your problems. Remember, Jesus was a teen, just like you! Modern teens face many challenges, but just think: when Jesus was a teen, he already knew he would have to save the world from SIN. And as though that weren’t enough, the elder rabbis gave him homework, too — just like you!”

All the Sunday school books Tia had read were written this way, but this was the first time they seemed so ridiculous to her. Perhaps, as her aunt Roberta never ceased to remind her, this was Marcelle’s bad influence. Perhaps, as she’d learned in her high school biology class, all bodies’ cells regenerate, and within seven years’ time, all cells have died and been reborn, and you are truly a new person. Tia stopped reading and looked up from the page, glancing at Sister Gwendolyn, who held her book in front of her as if she were about to begin singing carols from it. “Continue,” she said.

Marcelle now had the book in her lap and Tia had to lean over to see the words. Marcelle made an arrow from the word “homework” to the cartoon bubble she’d drawn. In the bubble next to Jesus’ head she’d written out a quadratic equation.

“Tia, Marcelle is busy taking notes and you can’t even concentrate on a simple passage. Read . Please.”

Tia continued, trying to read with a revitalized sense of duty:

“You, being a teenager, may be asked to drink alcohol, smoke drugs and other things, or ‘have a little fun.’ DON’T DO IT! Doing these things may seem ‘far out’ and ‘groovy,’ but they are not only dangerous to your health, they are also dangerous to your life as a Christian. When someone asks you to go to a party, you should ask yourself, ‘Would Jesus go to this party?’ If he wouldn’t, then that’s God’s way of telling you that the party is not for you.”

When Tia finished, Marcelle was putting the final touches on a crude drawing of three guys in bandannas asking the sketch of Jesus to attend their party.

Though Tia did not laugh very loud, or for a long time, the other girls, including Marcelle, looked at her, their eyes blinking the slow and steady concerned flashes of car hazard lights. All these other girls in her Sunday school had begun speaking in tongues, but Tia could not. You couldn’t fake it, though she had tried to at home. The fake tongues sounded like something between Pig Latin and a record played in reverse.

You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.

Tia could not afford to laugh, and yet she had done it.

“Sister Tia Townsend. May I remind you that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God .”

By the time Tia wove through the clusters of church members, Sister Gwendolyn and Tia’s aunt Roberta were already talking about her. Sister Gwendolyn wore a hat that looked like a strawberry birthday cake. Roberta’s hat was dove-gray, sleek as an airplane. At each angry quake of Sister Gwendolyn’s curls, Tia’s aunt Roberta furrowed her brow deeply, shook her head heartily, held her Bible so tight against her chest one might think it could ward off a heart attack.

Tia watched their hats drift away from each other. She knew what they were thinking: Tia did not Believe, thus Tia Laughed in her Heart, thus Tia was not able to Speak in Tongues. Their thoughts headed toward the same conclusion as tiny ants march toward the same mammoth crumb of bread.

TIA FOLLOWED Sister Gwendolyn past the sanctuary, past the pastor’s office. When they reached the hymnbook closet, Sister Gwendolyn took out a ring of keys and unlocked the door. “In here,” she said with a smile that never reached her eyes. She turned on the light, gesturing to the only chair in the closet, one used as a step stool for reaching the top shelves.

Sister Gwendolyn wedged herself in between Tia and the shelf of hymnbooks, wheezing the way big people do in small places. All the smells of the closet were buoyed by its heat: the hymnbooks, musty with years of sweaty palms, the bottles of anointing oil that had seeped through their boxes, marking the cardboard with round, greasy stains. And then there was Sister Gwendolyn’s signature odor: fig-smelling perfume, armpit sweat, cough drops.

By now the congregation would be filing into the sanctuary for Morning Service. Soon someone would begin jangling a tambourine and the choir would sing. Robin-breasted women would swell their bosoms, inhaling God.

“Sister Townsend,” Sister Gwendolyn said, “do you believe that you will ever receive the Holy Ghost?”

She knew the answer to that one. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

Sister Gwendolyn held her hands behind her back, sharking around Tia as best she could without her haunches threatening to unpry books from the shelves. Sister Gwendolyn raised her palms to either side of Tia’s head, as though Tia’s skull were a fly she was determined to trap with her bare hands. Tia had seen this done before, a more aggressive sort of laying-on-of-hands, usually performed on new members. Or the sick-hearted older ones, Brothers who refused to stay with wives, Sisters who refused to obey their husbands. Sister Gwendolyn began: This child oh Lord is not following in your path oh Lord show her the way oh Lord you died on the Cross at Calvary oh Lord and you came resurrected oh Lord but this child laughs at you oh Lord, spare her oh —