Bornfamous

When we had our own apartment, Mom and I went to church by streetcar every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. First Church of Christ, Scientist, was an imposing Greek temple of a building with columns and curleques and a cavernous hall for adult worship. Sunday school was in the basement where large round tables were scattered, surrounded by children of various age groups from five to twenty, when Christian Science students finally graduate to joint the adults upstairs.

I got a taste of what the adult services were like during Wedneday evening testimonial meetings, which I attended proudly with my mother. The Readers, a man and a woman, stood at the pulpit and took turns reading selected passages from the Bible and Science & Health by Mary Baker Eddy. The rest of the hour was opened for testimonies of healing from the congregation.

I loved the testimonies. After a long period of painfully uncomfortable silence, a man or woman would finally stand up and talk about how prayer had healed them or someone they knew. Sometimes it was a simple story of a small problem solved but sometimes it was a truly miraculous healing. They all sounded like miracles to me.

My favorite story wasn’t about a healing at all, however. A woman stood and told of walking down a dark city street at night. She was nervous so she prayed to God to keep a light around her, and she felt safe again. Later, while volunteering at a jail, an inmate said, “I know you. I saw you on the street one night and I was going to rob you, but two big men came out of the shadows and walked with you, so I went away.”

Of course, there were no men. I knew they were angels. I loved that story. It reminded me of my favorite Bible story: Daniel in the Lion’s Den. The Babylonians threw Daniel into a room with a ferocious lion, but he prayed and the lion didn’t hurt him.

I could listen to stories like that forever.

I wanted desperately to give my own testimony on Wednesday night but I had no healing experience to share. I was the only young child to attend these meetings, and I loved the attention I got from the adults after the meetings were over.

“She looks just like Doris Day must have looked as a child,” gushed one old woman to my dark-haired mother, “all blonde and freckled.”

From that moment, Doris Day was my favorite movie star.

“Mom,” I said on the streetcar ride home. “Can kids give testimonies?”

“I suppose,” said my mother. “Why, do you want to give one?”

I nodded my head.

“What do you want to say?”

I thought a moment. “I don’t know.”

“Well, if you think about it,” said Mom, putting her arm around my shoulder, “I’m sure you can remember a healing you’ve had.”

So I thought about it. Day after day, during class and recess, at breakfast and dinner, in the morning when I woke and at night as I tried not to sleep, I thought about what I was going to say at the next meeting.

Finally, I remembered a healing. It wasn’t much but it didn’t have to be. Anything would do, as long as I could stand up and for a minute or two, have the attention of the entire church full of grown-ups. It would be heaven.

Wednesday came. I bounded out of bed and ate my oatmeal, excited.

“Mom, I know what I’m going to say tonight!”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Do you want to hear it?”

“Sorry, honey,” she said, grabbing her coat and purse. “I’m late for work. But you can tell me when I get home, okay?”

She kissed me and was gone. All day, I mentally practiced my testimony.

“LaVonne, you aren’t paying attention,” said Miss Johnston, my second grade teacher.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t really.

That night when Mom got home from work, I was already dressed in my best blue dress.

“Can I tell you now?”

Mom slumped in a chair.

“Oh, can you wait until I take a shower? We’re late.”

I was too excited to be disappointed.

“Now?” I asked as we took our seats on the streetcar.

“Now,” said Mom, leaning down to hear as I whispered my testimony so other passengers couldn’t overhear.

“That’s very good,” she said when I was finished. “I’m impressed.”

I glowed all the way to First Church of Christ, Scientist.

The meeting hall seemed much bigger than I remembered - and so many people! The Readers’ voices echoed in the huge room. My heart scudded in my chest.

Finally, the time for testimony began. The long silence began. I looked up at my mother, who smiled and closed her eyes. My ears were hot. Could anyone hear my heart? They were all waiting for ME to STAND UP, I knew it, but I couldn’t move.

My head roared.

At last, a voice came from the back of the room and the testimonies began, while I strained to hear over my heartbeat and blaring brain.

Then we were crowding the aisles, adults murmuring compliments to those who had spoken. My disappointment in myself was drowned by a tidal wave of relief.

It was over. I could relax. Until next Wednesday. And the next Wednesday. And the next.

Wednesday evenings became a paralyzing ordeal of exhibitionism struggling with shyness, until one night for no particular reason, I found myself standing up.

I hadn’t noticed until that moment that nobody turned to look at the person who was speaking. Many had their eyes closed as they listened. The quiet was immense.

“When I was little –” I stammered, but I could tell by the lack of an echo that my voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard, so I started again.

“When I was little –” I felt like I was shouting. I could hear an encouraging murmur of quiet chuckles and sighs from the crowd.

“–I fell down the stairs.”

I looked at Mom, who was smiling with her eyes closed, nodding at the memory.

“I hurt my hand really bad and I was crying hard, but my mom picked me up and sat down with me on her lap and read to me from Science & Health. And my hand felt better.”

I plopped back on the pew, face hot, heart thumping, and saw heads nodding and lips smiling around me. Mom put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed, and I felt as though I had done something wonderful.

We didn’t believe in doctors; we believed in prayer, and what we prayed for was not to be healed but to understand the Truth: that illness is Error, and the mistake is ours for believing that it is real.

When I was told that concept in Sunday school, it was easy to accept but hard to put into practice. If I was sick, my mother would hold me and read to me from her ‘books’ but I never noticed any miraculous healing.

Like my injured hand, which I never believed was healed by prayer even though I testified otherwise — I had just felt compelled to get up and talk at the meeting, and soon I was coming up with a new ‘healing’ every week — my colds and flu all seemed to take their sweet time going away. But I was happy not to have to take pills and drink cod liver oil like my friends.

At the beginning of the school year, my mother signed a blue card and handed it to me.

“Give this to your teacher,” she said.

“What’s it for?”

“It’s a waiver. This means you don’t have to get shots like the other kids.”

“What’s a shot?”

“Well, the law says that every child must get vaccinated against things like polio and the measles. See –” Mom showed me a smooth, nickel-sized depression on her upper left arm. “This is the scar from my smallpox vaccination when I was a kid, before we joined the church.”

“How do they do it?” I asked, fingering the shiny spot on her arm.

“They use needles.”

“Like Daddy’s insulin?”

“Mm-hmm.”

It sounded good to me: no pills, no cod liver oil, and no shots. And there was an added bonus–I was Different. When classmates found out that I didn’t have to go to doctors or get shots, I could see the envy in their eyes. I liked that. When they found out that my father was dead and I was almost an orphan, that cemented my status as Special.

Second grade, Warrington Elementary School, a rainy September day. Miss Johnston, the beautiful Patrice who all the boys loved and all the girls admired, stepped out of the classroom for a moment, telling us to be quiet, and pandemonium erupted.

A dark, wildly handsome boy named Frank, on whom I had my first crush, grabbed my pencil and ran. I gave happy chase, but I slipped and fell, my head cracking loudly on the edge of a radiator. Blood, lots of blood, streamed down my white sweater, the class was suddenly quiet, and that’s when Miss Johnston came back.

My long blonde hair prevented the nurse from properly bandaging the wound on my scalp.

“Your parents will have to take you to the doctor for stitches,” she said.

“Oh, we don’t go to doctors,” I said, explaining my Special status. “We’re Christian Scientists.”

“Hmmph.” The nurse wasn’t impressed. She sent me home covered in dried blood, a Band-Aid dangling uselessly on a patch of hair in the back of my head.

Mrs. Knutsen, the old lady who lived in the apartment next door, and who was paid by my mother to keep an eye on me after school, was shocked at the bloody sight of me. I felt quite important.

Mrs. Knutsen took me into the bathroom to clean me up but the blood in my hair had dried into unmanageable clumps. She brought out a pair of scissors and cut off my long, beautiful hair.

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