Confession

This is the story I read for Serendipity Theatre Collective's 2nd Story on Sunday, October 29, at Webster's Wine Bar.


So I’m at work, in the kitchen, and Jamie walks in and she looks down at these heinous green pants she’s wearing and she says to me, “Do these look OK?” and I think to myself, “No, no those most certainly do not look OK.” But what I say to her is, “Um, you know, you can really pull those off.” And as I say it, I know I’m lying, but it’s out before I can stop it. And then I start wondering when I got this good at lying. And then I remember my first confession and how it’s all God’s fault.

See, I lied in my first confession. For those of you aren’t Catholic, you’re not supposed to do this.

Here’s what happened: It’s 1978, I’m eight-years old, I’m sitting in a tiny room painted brown or maybe orange, who can tell, it’s too dark to distinguish colors, there’s this odd half wall in the middle of the room. I’m sitting on one side of it. Father Novak is sitting on the other side. I’m wearing a collared shirt and a skirt and I hate wearing the collared shirt and the skirt. I’m picking the scabs on my knees. I’m nervous. I’d rather be climbing a tree.

Father Novak moves around in his chair. He’s old, probably about 100. He has a strip of gray hair running around his head and runny blue eyes. He says, “Are you ready?”

“Bless me father for I have sinned,” I say it quickly. I have been practicing this for weeks. He says his part, I don’t know what, those are his lines, not mine, and then I say, “This is my first confession.” I move from picking the scabs on my knees to picking at my fingernails. Father Novak says what he’s supposed to say at this point, again, his lines, not mine, so I have no idea what he’s actually saying. And then there’s quiet.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say my sin.

I close my eyes. I open them. I focus on a point on the blank wall in front of me. In my head the dramatic music that is the soundtrack of my life reaches a crescendo. It’s the Bee Gees. “Staying Alive.” And then, I say it. I say my sin: “I pushed Kelly Halter down the hill.”

And as I say it, I’m pretty sure I did it because I can see me doing it, I can see the tall dirt hill in the woods by my house, the group of kids from the neighborhood at the top of it, our bikes lined up like horses behind us, teetering on loose kickstands. I can see Kelly, with her exceptionally tan legs. She’s stick-like in that way that only an eight-year old can be, leaning over the top of the hill, looking down it, at the thin line of dirt that we made into our downhill track. I can see myself walk up behind her, put my hands on her back, and push. She tumbles like a cartoon, picking up dirt and grass and weeds as she somersaults down. I see her turn into a ball of brown dust until she hits the bottom. I hear an exaggerated plunk when she does.

Once I’ve finished telling my sin, I hear angels singing. They are very happy with my storytelling capabilities. I have just pulled off a world-class lie and I am damn proud of myself.

Father Novak gives me my penance: five prayers. Two Hail Marys. Three Our Fathers. I will whip through these prayers when I get home and then I’ll be back to my tree climbing.

I run out of the confessional, throwing my arms in the air. Now the soundtrack in my head is playing Queen, “We Are the Champions.” My mom is waiting in the last pew. She turns to watch me. When I meet her eyes, I do a last arm pump and then drop my arms to my sides. I run over to her.

OK, let me just tell you now, my mom is the most beautiful human being I’ve ever known. She has these amazingly bright blue eyes and when she smiles at you, well, probably not when she smiles at you, but when she smiles at me, I know I am the most special person that ever existed. And I don’t mean short-bus-to-school special.

So my mom is smiling at me. She gets up and takes my hand. “Not so bad?”

I smile. “Not so bad, Mommers.” We head down the aisle and out to the lobby. Pictures of saints line the walls that we walk by. “I made up a good one.”

She stops walking. “What?”

She’s looking out the doors that are mere feet away from us. Outside it’s sunny. There’s a parking lot filled with olive green station wagons, a subdivision beyond that where every third house is the same, the McDonald’s down the street doesn’t have a Playland.

“I made up a good one,” I say excitedly. “I said I pushed Kelly down a hill.” I smile up at her, expecting a pat on the back or her winning smile. She looks at me. No smile. Curious. I hear the loser’s song play in my head, “Wah, wah, wah.”

“You told Father Novak that you pushed Kelly down the hill?” She is annunciating, never a good sign.

“Yes.” I smile.

“In confession.”

“Yes.” I smile bigger.

My mom takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them she bends her knees slightly so that she’s looking me straight in my eyes and says, “But you didn’t push Kelly down the hill, did you?”

“Well, no. But it’s a good sin. Right?”

My mom glances back into the church. To this day I wonder if maybe she gave some sign to Jesus that meant she’d take care of this, you know, kinda like that scene from “The Godfather” where the one brother really fucks up and the Godfather is so pissed that he’s gonna kill him and then the other brother steps in and tells the dad that he’ll take care of it and takes full responsibility for the brother’s fuck up and the father forgives the other brother, even though we all know he wants to kill him, and I don’t even know if this is really a scene in “The Godfather,” but I think my mom made the same kinda deal with Jesus that day.

She pulls me into the parking lot. We get in the car. I can smell the warm summer breeze and just-cut grass. My mom starts the engine and Kasey Kasem pops out of the radio. He’s counting down the top 20 songs of the week. “Honey,” my mom says, her hands perched on the steering wheel, the car still in park, “in confession, we’re supposed to confess a sin that we actually did.”

Let me just tell you now, no one ever said anything about being truthful in confession.

What they did say was that I needed to confess a sin because I’m a guilty screw up. I learned this in CCD, which is like Catholic school lite. CCD stands for . . . I don’t know what it stands for. But this is where we learned the rules, like: The Pope is always right, virgins have babies, drinking the blood of Christ is normal. And you learn about sinning. Now, according to my lessons, a sin was:
1. Murdering someone
2. Stealing from someone
3. Having sex with someone else’s spouse, or
4. Burning up someone else’s wheat field, barn, sheep, or other income-producing, farm-related items

Like I said, I was eight, so I hadn’t quite figured out how to murder, I didn’t know why farm items were so important, and having sex was just ewww.

Since I didn’t do any of the things on the list, I thought I was sinless. So I decided to make something up. Sure, it wasn’t on the list, but I took a lot of time working on the details. I chose Kelly because she was my best friend and so that would make it a really big sin. I said I pushed her down the hill because, secretly, I’d been dying to push her down the hill. Sometimes she bugged me.

But in the car, with my mom next to me, her voice gentle, I start to think maybe this sin I made up isn’t so good. “Mom,” I say, very adult, very knowing-of-the-world, “I didn’t do any of the things they said were sins.”

“Well, I guess . . . well.” She looks at me and then out the windshield. She pulls the gear shift down into drive and we start rolling towards the stop sign.

The parking lot is treacherous. Everyone loses their saintliness the second they leave church and get in their cars. My mom keeps her eyes focused forward. “Listen, honey, confession is your time to talk to God. Let Him know you made a mistake and you’re willing to fix it.”

“But God wasn’t there. It was just Father Novak.”

She laughs softly to herself. “Of course God is there. He’s always in church.”

“Well, he did a good job of hiding himself.” Now I’m mad. First, no one tells me I have to tell the truth in confession and now I find out that God was eavesdropping on my conversation with Father Novak? “You know,” I tell her, “if I had to talk to God, I coulda just stayed home and talked to him in my room where we have some privacy.” And then it occurs to me: Oh my God. I have just lied to God.

“Mom. I just lied to God.”

She presses her foot to the brake and we come to a gentle stop. Someone behind us honks. Another car pulls around us and moves excitedly to the stop sign.

“Oh my God, Mom. Are they gonna kick me off softball? What if I can’t go on the field trip next week? Does this mean I’m gonna flunk all my classes?”

“Baby doll,” my mom says.

“You know, I made up a really good one. I took a lot of time making up all those details and it was a good story and that should count for something and . . . I don’t get it, Mom.”

My mom looks into my face for a long time. She says, “I don’t get it either, baby.”

I think about all the people in my family, all the ones who came before me and practiced this religion and had to tell sins when they were eight, too. I think about my grandma and how she does the rosary twice a day, and my aunt who goes to church on Fridays and Sundays, and the crucifix with the wilting palm leaves on the back of my bedroom door.

My mom takes a deep breath and slumps her shoulders—a move that over the years I will come to expect in our discussions about religion. These discussions will include logic that I never understand, reasoning that follows a maze-like path, theories that must be believed in order to get into Heaven. My mom will spend years patiently trying to explain to me why things are the way they are. She’s not gonna have much success.

My mom turns from me and looks at the road in front of her. We start to slowly roll forward. I look out the windshield too and as I do I feel her grab my hand and squeeze. Regardless of all that stuff that is coming in the future, in this one precious moment all I need is for my mom to tell me I’m OK. And she does. My mom says, “It was a good one, honey. You made up a good story.”

I turn to look at her. She’s smiling. She glances at me quickly and then looks back to the road in front of her. Suddenly, I don’t care that I just lied to God. I’m thinking he’ll get over it.