Free The Art Student's War by Brad Leithauser Page B

passed through a period (it had tyrannized her for months, before vanishing almost without a trace) when she’d needed to reconstruct her day in a peculiar, fixed fashion, recalling the precise order in which she’d first laid eyes on her family. Mamma and Papa and Stevie and Edith and (if she’d seen them that day) Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace or Grandpa Paradiso and Grandma Paradiso—whom had she first clapped eyes on? And second? Third? Fourth? The entire day had to be reenacted around something as arbitrary and meaningless as that … There were no words for most of this business, and Bea had no way to think it through, although thinking it through was what she attempted along the seam of sleep, pursuing it inloops and swirls, painterly shapes and also ugly, unimaginative, oppressively repetitive repetitive repetitive shapes, where was the escape and why was sleep so elusive? Defended by its staunch animal quartet, her bed helped keep such forces at bay, and this was the real reason she’d always resisted sleeping over at Maggie’s, or at Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace’s.
    Were the night thoughts of everybody else so different from their day thoughts? Bea had pondered this a great deal, mostly at night, and while aware of the omnipresent risk of self-delusion, still it did seem to her, to Bianca Paradiso, that she could date precisely the moment when everything turned. She had been twelve—Edith’s age. She’d been in church, which was somewhat surprising, given that churches had never figured large in her imagination. She had spent little time in St. Charles Borromeo, or any of the other local Catholic churches. (Papa, relishing his scattering of slang, sometimes called Mass “a load of mumbo jumbo.”) And Bea had felt even less affiliated with either the Lutheran or the Presbyterian churches Mamma vacillated between, depending on whether her German or Scottish ancestry called.
    For a time, on Sunday afternoons, Bea used to go with Maggie to the MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship; it was the church group of the really popular crowd at Barbour Intermediate. Usually it was taught by parents of kids in the group, but on one special occasion Reverend Kakenmaster himself addressed them.
    He had a style unlike anything Bea had ever seen in a man of the cloth. He looked right at you and his face burned bright red. He posed a long string of questions, to which the rather puzzling answer always was, I say yes, I abide by that . The children chanted the reply. The questions involved choosing good over evil, and God over the Devil, and innocence over depravity.
    Through the stained-glass window a beam of golden light from Heaven itself drilled Reverend Kakenmaster’s high domed forehead. “It is up to you, boys and girls,” the glowing-headed man of God declared. The beam of light added a sort of horn to his head. “You must decide which it will be: purity or filthiness. Jesus Christ instructed you to choose purity, and what do you say to that?”
    And it was precisely at this sacred but precarious instant that some impulse not originating in Heaven alighted inside Bea’s brain.
    In her mind’s eye she envisioned herself boldly standing up, in the powder-blue dress with white lace collar and white fagoting on thesleeves that Aunt Grace had made for her, and declaring right back at Reverend Kakenmaster, “I say no, I say——to that,” in which the blank word was an unspeakable term. What would they say, yes, and what would they do? What would they all do if she fearlessly stood up in her lacy blue dress and yelled, “I say——to that.”
    It was all somewhat laughable now, so many years later, but at the time the image was so vivid and upsetting that Bea afterward had felt sick, her insides bubbling above the beige toilet bowl in the Methodist ladies’ room, and later that evening, in expiation, she had required herself mentally to chant one hundred times, I say yes, I abide by that . Only, she could never