Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Sooner or later she always ran out of commercials, though, like a toy winding down. Then all would go quiet and we’d return cheerlessly to our books. Our reading material was random and inappropriate, delivered to us in unlabeled cardboard boxes from Leopoldville. We suspected Mr. Axelroot of having better boxes that he took to luckier children elsewhere. Back in Bethlehem, we ourselves had organized book drives for the underprivileged, and now I pitied those children who got slogged with our dusty second-rate novels and outmoded home-carpentry manuals, and were expected to be grateful about it. When we get back home, I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them.

From the same nursery-school lot that brought the Bobbsey Twins I chose a Nancy Drew, out of pure boredom, feeling guilty, and outraged to be reduced to that circumstance, as a young woman who menstruates and reads at the college level. Though I must confess, some of the Nancy Drews held my attention. One of them had a strange, secret-basement plot that led me astray, while I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, into long fantasies that felt sinful. I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. I did have thoughts of the Devil at these times. I imagined Nancy descending a long iron staircase into the netherworld, and a man who waited for her at the bottom. Sometimes he was just a shadowy faceless man in a hat. Sometimes he had a gap-toothed smile and an elegant, scarred face. Other times he was that red Devil who lurks on the Underwood ham cans, self-satisfied and corrupt in his bow tie, mustache, and arrow-point tail. The first time I dreamed this scenario I can’t really say whether I was still awake or had fallen into a feverish, colorful sleep. All I know is that suddenly I snapped out of it, surrounded by the sharp odor of my own sweat, and felt prickled and exquisitely wide awake below the waist. I knew this feeling was very wrong. Even so, I had more such dreams-and sometimes, I’m sure, I was still half awake when they began.

After a few weeks my fevers became more pronounced, and my mother realized that because I am large and active for my age she’d been underestimating my dosage of quinine. Those feelings below my waist, it turns out, were a side effect of malaria.

For Christmas Mother gave us all needlework things.We’d known not to expect much, and lest we forget, Father’s Christmas-morning sermon was all about having grace in your heart, which displaces the lust for material things. But still. For a Christmas tree we had a palm frond stuck in a bucket of rocks. As we gathered around it and waited our turn to open our meager, constructive gifts, I stared at that pitiful frond decorated with white frangipani angels going brown around the edges, and decided the whole thing would have been better off ignored. Even when you’ve recently turned fifteen without a birthday cake, it’s hard to be that mature about Christmas.

Mother announced that now we girls could use our idle time to build up our hope chests. I’d heard of this kind of thing before, without giving it a second thought. I’d seen those Mark Eden advertisements in the backs of comic books, which promised things embarrasing to look at, and so I assumed that building a hope chest was a question of exercising the muscles of the chest to get busts. But no, that wasn’t it at all. Mother meant the other kind of chest, like a steamer trunk, in which a girl was supposed to put everything she hoped she’d get to use one day after she got married. This was her rationale for all the embroidery floss, pinking shears, and so on that we toted (secretly or otherwise) across the Atlantic.

Now we were supposed to get enthusiastic about long-range marriage plans, while lying here in bed watching our shoes mildew. Rachel and Adah were assigned any number of hope-chest projects to work on, but the domestic arena was never my long suit, so I was to focus on a single, big project: a cross-stitch tablecloth. It’s nothing but a thousand tiny x’s to be made up in different colors of thread. The tablecloth has the pattern stamped straight on the linen in washable ink, like a paint-by-numbers picture. A monkey could do it, if he got bored enough. Certainly no talent is required for cross-stitch. The hopeful part, I guess, is that after you’re done with it all, you’ll find someone who’d want to marry you.

Personally I can’t see it as likely. In the first place I am flat-chested, just plain too skinny. When Adah and I got moved up two grades, it just made things that much worse. We were preacher’s daughters to begin with, and now we were really onions in the petunia patch, amongst all those ninth-grade girls with flirty eyes and foundation makeup and bosoms poking out the fronts of their mohair sweater sets. No boy ever looked at me except for homework help. And to tell the truth, I can’t say that I care. Kissing looks like too much of somebody else’s dental hygiene if you ask me. If you want to see stars-which is what Rachel claims it’s all about-then why not just go climb up a tree in the dark? When I try to picture the future, I can’t see myself as anything but a missionary or a teacher or a farmer, telling others how the Lord helps those that help themselves. Some kind of a life of piety, at any rate (which should guarantee that Adah’s nowhere within a hundred miles); and I should like to spend as much time as I can outdoors, exulting in God’s creation, and wear pants if at all possible.

I do sometimes picture myself with children, for why else am I keeping my notebook, with all the lessons of my childhood in Africa? Yet you can’t say boo to your own children without a husband first. It does seem a dreadful obstacle.

My father says a girl who fails to marry is veering from God’s plan-that’s what he’s got against college for Adah and me, besides the wasted expense-and I’m sure what he says is true. But without college, how will I learn anything of any account to teach others? And what red-blooded American boy will look twice at a Geography whiz with scabs on her knees, when he could have a Sweater Girl? I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see. God must know his arithmetic. He’d plan it out well enough to plunk down a husband for every wife that He aims for to have one. If the Lord hasn’t got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that’s His business.

Rachel, on the other hand, has never had any doubts in this department. Once she got over the initial shock of no new record album by the Platters, no mohair twin set, nor any place to wear or dance to either one, she was thrilled by the notion of a hope chest, or pretended to be. Why, she’d throw herself belly down on her bed with her knees cocked and feet sticking up and her busy hands five inches in front of her eyes, plowing through her hope-chest projects in earnest. She seemed to think she needed to have it all finished up in the next week or so. Oh, she monogrammed guest towels and crocheted collars for her trousseau and I don’t know what all. It was the only time she ever stopped rolling her eyes and flicking her hair, to settle down to a piece of honest work.

Adah and I dragged our sewing projects out to the porch so we could still keep an eye out for interesting goings-on in the world. Something had come between Adah and me for the worse, since the day she was supposed to have been followed by that lion, which the whole village was still talking about. They loved to point Adah out when they saw us, pantomiming a lion’s roar, which didn’t help us to put the affair behind us. But on the bright side, the event provided a great boost for Father’s church. People seem to think that if Jesus could stop a lion from gobbling up a poor lame girl, he must be staying awake pretty good for the Christians-ha! Just when everybody was thinking their regular African gods were aggravated with us and fixing to teach us a lesson. The way they see it, it was kind of a wrestling match between the gods, -with Jesus and Adah coming out on top. Father of course says this is superstitious and oversimplifying matters. But as luck would have it, he’d preached the parable of Daniel and the lions’ den just a few days before, so naturally now they are knocking each other over to get to church on Sunday. And Adah is the cause. Father is pleased as punch with Adah, I don’t care what he says-he put his arm around her shoulder in public! Which is not entirely fair.