Wife Material: A Novel of Misbehavior and Freedom

By Deborah Cox

Wife Material tells a story of religious abuse and sexual repression in the modern Church of Christ denomination, an American sect that forbids women speaking in services. Elizabeth Campbell's parents are violinists. Her father seems gay. Their church disallows musical instruments and homosexuality. Elizabeth succumbs to the twisted violence in her family and the pressure for early marriage at conservative Waltham University, the flagship Church-of-Christ college where suicides abound. Then, she escapes fundamentalism through a series of liberating sins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996554701

Book preview

Sally

Prologue

1869

Though we were yet unborn, my family’s shape was carved by the preacher’s announcement that day as he climbed the wooden steps to the podium. He adjusted his spectacles while the congregation tensed. Paper fans stopped in the sultry Tennessee air, which settled around the bodies of the believers. He drew a small piece of paper out of his breast pocket and unfolded it. A baby whimpered. The preacher looked up the center aisle as if to clear it for the procession of his words.

The elders have prayed, he said, clearing his throat, and discussed at great length our present dilemmas with the brethren worshiping elsewhere in our region. We’ve drawn upon the immutable Word of the Lord rather than the wisdom of man, which is perilously swayed by the love of money and the treasures of this earth. He looked out at the people.

The Church in Wilson County will not add other articles of faith and acts of worship than those practices explicitly authorized in the New Testament.

No piano. No violin or Jew’s harp. No musical instruments of any kind. Only the voices of God’s children, raised in pure, unadulterated song.

Each man and woman in that clapboard church building, some my ancestors, had survived the Civil War and Brownlow’s reconstruction. They had suffered unspeakable loss, farms and schools left in great ash heaps just a few years before. Reduced as they were, these Christians refused to honor anything that smacked of the North: the intelligentsia, the high and the mighty. They chiseled their new religion from solid outrage.

The men nodded. The women, in their capes and bonnets, looked satisfied. At least we aren’t like those uppity Memphis folks with their big-city money and stained glass. At least we aren’t like the nigras in Nashville with their organ, all puffed up with Satanic pride.

There’ll be no Devil’s music here.

PART I

1. The Wedding Night

1988

My new husband looked like a mound of biscuit dough. He had his mother’s hips. Unless you actually saw his private parts, you might not realize he was, in fact, a man. He waited for me under the hotel blanket as I tiptoed out of the small Vanderbilt bathroom in my chenille robe, reluctantly exposing my skin to conditioned air as I slipped it off. He smiled like a dimpled three-year-old about to eat pudding. It was dark except for glowing shafts that wound around the open bathroom door. I hurried into the stiff, clean sheets with him, a bit of moonlight misting in through a crack in the heavy sixth-floor drapes. The clock on the polished nightstand said 1:15 a.m. I missed my mother.

An hour ago, somebody else’s wedding party reveled in the lobby as we arrived at the hotel. The other bride still wore her finery, her updo falling in a sexy droop, and her friends laughed and glistened with perspiration in their cocktail dresses, like they’d been dancing for hours. They looked breezy and comedic, in the way of Eddie Bauer models. A hunky groom stood by this other bride, joking with tuxedoed friends. Her gaiety gagged me—I had no idea why. At this moment in the sheets with Ted, I thought of her. She was happier than me.

Just do it already.

Without prelude, my husband hoisted himself on top of me, facedown, balancing on his toes in plank position, ready to perform the deed for which we’d come to this fancy Nashville hotel. We observed this milestone in our human development as if following instructions from a textbook on how to create a Christian marriage—the chapter: On Your Honeymoon. I detected a faint breath of reluctance in him, the weight of his body pressed me into the fresh linens. I thought I might suffocate, my lack of oxygen causing hallucinations of Eugenia, who’d made this bed for us today and left her scraggly signature on a white envelope resting against the pillows. I saw her standing in a corner with her feather duster.

I saw myself leaping up from that bed, pulling the telephone into the bathroom with me to call my mother. At this moment, she slouched in a metal folding chair with a lapful of cranberry ribbons plucked from my wedding decor. You’re so fortunate to have a man who loves you.

Ted pounded against my tight young thighs while a screen full of inappropriate images played on the backs of my eyelids. I thought of all those Waltham boys I did not marry. Because they did not ask.

2. Teeny’s Church of Christ

1969

Don’t squash your egg, Lizzie. You’re squashing your egg. Here. He penetrated the small space between my left palm and the neck of the tiny violin with his index finger. I watched us in the mirror. Soft white cheeks and dimples; I was three. The young teacher ran down the carpeted hallway in high heels to fetch a tiny boy who had just escaped the class on his short legs. My father checked my hands. He leaned over me with his black Irish hair, like mine.

The intermediates yum-pum-pummed their Suzuki in the next room. The wall muffled their notes as their teacher sang and clapped, like my mother in her violin classes, circling the students, stopping now and then to nudge a hand or a scroll into place.

Outside the window of the conservatory, city buses stopped and squeaked open to let in the older students with their cello cases and backpacks. The door to our large room stood ajar, and I heard the faint sound of a piano being played across the hall. My head turned reflexively toward the clean, crystal tones.

Milwaukee showed signs of reluctant change. Coal-fire sooted downtown buildings. Father Groppi took to the streets and fought for desegregated housing. My pale-skinned parents stared out the car windows, mouths agape. Outside the city, Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh president, NASA launched Apollo 9, and the Beatles-era ended. Students everywhere shook their fists and their booties on the television screen. We lived above it all, like plastic people on a wedding cake.

I skated around the room on invisible blades and hummed Strauss with the Boston Pops, waving my arms like ostrich plumes.

Lizzie, come sit in yer Daddy’s lap.

I ignored him. Partly because of how he said Daddy. I preferred to think of him as Martin or my father. He said Daddy with a slight forward tongue thrust—through the nose with a half-grin. It seemed dirty. He reached for me. I gave in and endured his protruding kneecaps. His touch made me squirm. It was the touch of someone who expects you to push his hand away, and I did. His features contradicted each other, eyebrows pushed down, lips held up as if to smile, as he pushed his fingertips into my back before I could get away.

Don’t you love yer poor ole Daddy? Neither poor nor old, his words belonged to someone else long gone. Everything he said and did, his jokes and poems and health obsessions, came from the mysterious past, like the concerns of a dead relative or someone on a Norman Rockwell calendar. He loved to climb around in country graveyards and jot down names in spiral notebooks. He looked happier in a cemetery than he did at home. He embodied mystery. His notebooks filled four large boxes in his closet. Other notebooks stood upright on bookshelves and rested under beds with the dust mites. I flipped through them and saw names of ancestors circled in blue ballpoint ink. Sketches of cemeteries in Tennessee and Arkansas showed where they all lay under granite blocks. Dailey, Kennedy, Malone, O’Carroll. He wrote in those notebooks every day.

My father’s voice was small and light. He walked around the house clearing his throat, forced the sound through his chest and talked to himself, so he could practice telling people off. You stupid so-and-so. Useless as tits on a bull. I should kick your scrawny two-bit arse. And then with a sigh, he whispered, Stupid voice, under his breath, where he assumed I couldn’t hear. Before I was born, he had a pet canary named Mickie, whose ashes rested in a mayonnaise jar on a top closet shelf. He moved the lidded jar from Texas to Wisconsin with us.

My father had to have nine hours of sleep every night or his fingers refused to work properly the next day. He had to have eggs or bacon for breakfast. He so feared being hungry, he carried bananas and peanut butter sandwiches with him everywhere he went. They stuck out of his coat pockets as he dashed out the door, lugging two violins, a roll of toilet tissue, and a stack of loose papers that threatened to blow away in the windy parking lot.

He spent most of his time in the small apartment bathroom. He stood in there with his shiny violin for hours, practicing or washing himself, surrounded by four-year-old wedding gifts: the olive bath mat, the lidded comb holder be-studded with porcelain flowers. He brushed his teeth and scraped his tongue—his translucent Oral-B bent permanently backward with the pressure. He played Mendelssohn and Bach. Our neighbors below stood under the free concert that spilled in through their bathroom air vents while they teased their hair or trimmed their beards.

The phone rang in the kitchen, where my mother chopped carrots into little wheels.

Hello? he answered with a question, like someone who doesn’t want to talk on the phone.

Yes, Mother, I read the sermon, my father said.

Uh, well, Brother Mannings was talking about impure living. He twisted the curly cord around his index finger. My mother looked at him and smiled. She was beautiful, her skin lush and white, her hair the shade of coffee, her belly round with my brother, David. She adored Martin. She tried to take him seriously.

Yes, he cleared his throat to deepen his voice. I thought he made some fine points.

Yes, and the women’s libbers too.

Yes, and the homosexuals.

Unbelievers. I know, Mother. There are a lot of them around here. He shifted on his feet and looked for me, gesturing that I should get on the other phone. My father was pulled apart, a cartoon man who grabs at the dock as his rowboat floats out from under him. Milwaukee was full of beer drinkers and modern ideas. And it was cold. At night, he wrapped his head in a sweater to fall asleep. But he had a job here, playing in a big symphony. And those liberals and Catholics and beer drinkers went to concerts.

We’re Christians in a heathen world, he said.

I adored my grandmother. Teeny lived in Arkansas. She wore giant glasses that magnified her eyes to twice their actual size and her nails were manicured in cranberry or Bordeaux. She was the most fetching grandmother. No granny dresses for Teeny. No pastels. No florals. Teeny wore suits with padded shoulders and gold chains and bangles. The pages of her Bible bled—so many red lines under the life-or-death verses. She hugged it on the way into church and looked across the street at the Baptists with their organs and their wrongness.

Ah, Mother, my father cleared his throat and said, we have a concert coming up, and I’d love for you and Daddy to come. I danced around him.

We’re playing a Sibelius—I think you’d like it. He pointed again to the back room, urging me with his eyes. He wanted me to cheer up his mother.

Oh, that’s right. It is cold here . . . . Well, maybe in the summertime.

Yeah, that Jack Mannings—he’s something all right. They went back to the famous Church of Christ preacher, traveling the country, scaring everybody into a pure life. I ran to my parents’ bedroom and picked up the other line. Teeny’s voice was loud in my ear.

Well, it’s about time somebody taught those young people about Hell! my grandmother said. I’m so glad that Bible salesman came to visit that day. You were just a little boy. I pictured my father as a child, playing outside while his mother got a Bible lesson. Martin, if that boy hadn’t shown up at our house and told us how to get baptized the right way, we’d all be lost!

I suppose we would, Martin said.

Hi, Teeny.

"Lizzzzzziieeee! Is that you, hon? How’s my girrrl?"

I’m fine. When are you coming, Teeny?

When your new baby gets here, hon. I’ll get on an airplane and come see you.

Back in Teeny's Bible Belt, it was always warm, and people lined up on cool church pews to hear the famous preachers from the Christian Colleges. Teeny's husband had a watery stare and he grinned inappropriately, which made me wish to avoid him. He always left the bathroom smelling foul; I think he peed on the rug. But at least he went to church. Everybody went to church. Here in Milwaukee, bodies jammed into every available seat to hear a Mendelssohn concerto. But there were corruptions in the city: divorces, affairs, and striptease joints—rock concerts and women’s conventions. Which was why Martin knew, with some regret, we could not stay.

"Does your mother like her job, Lizziieeee?"

Um.

Yes, Cecille enjoys her teaching. But she hates to leave Lizzie, Martin said, and it was true. My mother cried all the way to the babysitter’s each day. There, with the babysitter’s bland children, I was forced to take naps with the shades drawn, all of us in separate rooms, while she watched Days of our Lives. I ached with the boredom of this place and its indignities: shoe removal, alphabet soup, the smell of whole milk.

Mississippi hot dog, Mississippi hot dog, Mother sang while the public-school children clapped. She missed her Daddy, my Ganzie, back in Texas. I noticed how she said "my Daddy, like she said God or Heavenly Father Up Above." She tucked her paychecks in a fund for Martin’s new violin, the Contreras.

Lizzie’s been practicing her violin.

Has she now? said Teeny in my ear.

Our house was different. I could keep my shoes on and listen to records. There was no nap schedule and music always played somewhere. Martin practiced his violin constantly. A few years back, I listened to Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, live from the middle of the Fort Worth Symphony violin section, from the warmth of my mother’s womb, and now there were the daily bathroom rehearsals and regular trips to the symphony. Thus I developed, like my parents, a need for the sounds.

Teeny, I have a piano.

You do? My lans! I was more excited about my piano than my violin. It was a miniature piano, finished in a dark blue gloss. It sat in my lap, where I plucked out Jesus Loves Me. I felt the half steps inching their way down a scale. I studied my fingers, working each one independently, pointing and stretching them, savoring the strength and intuition of each first joint.

Sunday morning, we hopped into the Falcon and drove downtown. Mother and I wore matching dresses. We sat in a fine old building purchased from Episcopalians who’d left the inner city. I swung my feet and looked up at the stained glass in the baptistery.

There is no need for rioting in a godly atmosphere where young people know what’s expected of them. The visiting preacher from Tennessee bellowed the benefits of Christian education while we listened from the mahogany pews. There is no need for the sin of fornication when young people know God’s will for their lives! Teeny would have loved to hear this preacher from David Lipscomb College. She would much rather have bought a plane ticket to hear this sermon than to hear the Milwaukee Symphony. THE BODY MUST BE CONTROLLED! he shouted. Young people need the proper leadership to CONTROL THEIR BODIES!

Somewhere in Montreal, John and Yoko stretched in their white nightgowns as morning sunshine warmed the hotel room, jammed with reporters and cameramen and the big bedspread. Somewhere in Maryland, a boy named Macon sat in a Presbyterian church and studied the stained glass windows. Hillary Rodham looked out from the pages of Life magazine as she gave her commencement speech at Wellesley College. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. My mother clipped the speech and kept it in a drawer. My father called her a women’s libber.

Here at church, my mother's lap felt better than my father's. She held her left hand out in front of us, her thumb tracing the white gold and diamond rings. It took energy to keep herself in line and do his bidding, especially when she inwardly thought he was full of crap. Other couples sat close on the church pew, the wife’s shoulder cozied under the husband’s. A few inches of wood separated my parents’ bodies as they sat in God’s house. I felt Mother ease over gently, one breath at a time. She tried to feel the wool of his jacket on her arm.

The erosion of morals is bringing down this country, the preacher went on. We have more women than ever trying to act like men, look like men, wear the clothing of men. Students at public institutions usurp the authority of their teachers, committing grave sins in public places. The world is a place of fornication and immorality!

I felt my parents suck in their breath. Affannato. They looked down at me.

And they knew for sure we could not stay.

PART II

3. The Land of Milk and Honey

1974

I will not have pre-marital or extra-marital sexual relations while I am at Waltham.

I will not consume alcohol or tobacco while I am at Waltham.

I will not use obscene language while I am at Waltham.

I will not dance or attend dances or patronize businesses at which there is dancing taking place while I am at Waltham.

I will not engage in secret marriages while I am at Waltham.

My parents signed the form, and we moved to Waltham. Waltham University, in the little town of Sunset, Tennessee.

I sat in the cab of the big yellow truck and sobbed into a paper bag full of Barbies. Mother drove the station wagon with David and our new brother Noah, just a few months old. The long, brown car was a donation from Ganzie. Martin kept losing his jobs and we kept moving back and forth between Tennessee, Texas, and Arkansas. I never asked why. But when he got the offer from Waltham, he read it to us over dinner and beamed.

You're a very fortunate young lady, Martin said. You get to go to Waltham Academy,—he tucked the jar of canary ashes into the glove compartment—and take Bible classes every day. His voice was unusually gentle, and I watched the cloud of his words hanging in the December air between us. We were headed to the Promised Land.

Rachmaninoff played in my head all morning, through the pines of eastern Tennessee, toward Memphis, and then back out on its far southern perimeter to Sunset. Arpeggios spanned the whole keyboard, forced the pianist to stretch the fingers beyond their natural reach.

The next morning, I woke up at Two Brighton Place, in a new bedroom with a bay window and built-in bookshelves. I put on my plaid coat and dingo boots. I clopped up an empty sidewalk to the new school, Mother by my side. The six-block-square campus lay still at 9:00 a.m. because at this time, everyone, everywhere, was sitting down. All the children sat in their classrooms, the college students in their chapel seats. The only standers at nine in the morning on a Waltham weekday were two suited men who spoke into microphones. One of them led a large college auditorium of co-eds in a verse of Angry Words, Oh Let Them Never from the Tongue Unbridled Slip. The other one led a small auditorium of high school youth in prayer. The Academy building, for grades one through twelve, occupied a corner at the east end of Waltham’s campus, next to the buff brick music center where my father would soon be working. The outside hedges of the Academy glistened with frost. The inside halls were quiet. And although I did not see them, in their high school chapel seats, six senior cheerleaders sat in a row with red skirts skimming their knees.

Lizzie, my mother whispered as she glanced around. These people expect a lot from us,

What? I shivered.

Girls have to be careful, she said. A sinkhole dropped open in my stomach. Like modesty. If you wore something too short, they’d say I wasn’t doing my job. I pushed her voice to the background. It embarrassed me.

No mixed swimming. No shorts.

"Agh," I sighed hard.

Christian colleges are good for families. They have no dances here. Her eyebrows arched up, and her lips pushed down like she was sucking on something sour.

All-girl swimming was no big deal to me. And we were two whole seasons away from shorts. But the tightening of Mother’s face made me want to jerk away and run the other direction. Her stiff jaw brought back the halter rebellion of 1973. I was seven at the time. I borrowed my friend Janet’s red-bandana halter while visiting at her house in Nashville, wore it to McDonalds, showing my lily-white back, and then got picked up by my mother. She tried to comprehend the garment from seven yards away as she pulled into the parking space. What do you have on? she said as I got into the car. It wasn’t a question. She was making the same face now, yet I was now covered head-to-toe in wool and leather.

You went to dances when you were in high school.

I didn’t like it. Nani made me go.

She didn’t think they were wrong? I asked.

Nani’s Baptist. That statement summed up volumes of doctrinal differences that split my mother’s childhood home in two. To us, the Baptists were a bunch of loose-thinking liberals.

But your dad let you go? I pictured Ganzie scowling as mother waved good-bye in her party dress.

He didn’t like it.

Why? I asked.

Dances make boys and girls move their bodies, she said, and I thought, So does tennis, as she struggled for words. In ways that can be inappropriate. A few moments of silence followed while she pondered. I mean, dancing close to a boy can cause him . . . difficulty. She’d been clipping articles from The Gospel Advocate with titles like Indecent Dress Provokes Another Problem and Don’t Become a Hippie.

Your grandmother said nobody would ever like me if I didn’t go.

Oh.

So I went, she said. You’re lucky, Liz. You won’t have to deal with that at Waltham. I felt my mother shift into a tighter gear. She confused me, which is why I got so sleepy around her sometimes. Mother ate, slept, and breathed the orchestra. I remembered a quartet rehearsal the year before. She embodied maestoso. In fact, her upper torso swiveled with such pronouncement, I started to hate a particular Germanic, military-sounding motif that always comes around in Mozart pieces. Dum ti-dum dum dum dum. This was truly the stuff of interpretive dance: necks, chins, arms, wrists, all curled and swaying and rippling with emphasis. Yet here she was, worried what people might think.

We opened the heavy front doors and slipped inside where it was warm. The elementary wing of Waltham Academy had gray and red painted cinder block walls, old asbestos tile underfoot. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down the front hall. A furnace clanked. We found the office and in it a woman with coiffed, gray hair.

You must be the Campbells, she said, twinkling her eyes.

Mrs. Hackman was a kind of teacher-in-charge whose voice frightened me though her language was intended to be pleasant. It was the way she pronounced her words with a dry smack, like a parched Betty Davis. Coral lipstick lined the edges of her mouth. Her eyes seemed aluminum and her smile froze me in place.

"You will really enjoy it here," Mrs. Hackman’s smile embossed her face, her voice made artificially lower by being forced, her eyes penetrating and then quickly jerking away. I thought she could either reach across and slap me or start crying. Behind her, a wooden paddle hung on the wall amongst certificates in brass frames.

One half of the old Academy building was dedicated to little kids in grades one through six. The other half was occupied by junior high- and high-schoolers. I heard the sounds of muffled piano music plinking from an upright that needed tuning. Mrs. Hackman led us to the back entry of the dim little auditorium where a class of second-graders skipped to the beat of The Caisson Song. Up and down the middle aisle we watched them, boys with long-leggity skips, once around and then selecting another child to follow, two boys now, then a third, and then, finally, forced to begin picking girls.

This is Mrs. Henry’s music class. We use this room for assemblies and chapel services. A gray-haired woman sat behind the piano accompanying the skippers with a ploom-chick-ploom-chick. Chapel day is Friday, Mrs. Hackman said. And of course, she cleared her throat and assured us, we push the piano against the wall for worship services. She pointed at the necessary evil, and I caught my mother’s momentary trance.

Oh, I see, my mother said, straightening. Abafando. I watched her slip into the layered sediment where a person is confused about why they’re confused. We held our breath between the gray of muteness and the green of spoken thoughts.

And right down here is your room, Lizzie. She led us to the doorway that framed a smiling grandmother. Mrs. Stringer, this is Lizzie Campbell. She’s a new student in your class. Her father’s the new music professor. Our jowly guide left us at this point, and my mother patted me good-bye.

I stood alone at the front of the classroom and Mrs. Stringer moved closer, her voice soft. Claire, would you come help Lizzie get her coat into the closet?

A girl with the face of an angel and hair hanging in waves below her waist rose and came to help, leading me back out into the vast hall and over to the coat closet and then back to our room, where my peers sat under mid-century light fixtures that held round bulbs surrounded by ringed shades. Four girls sat together on one side of the classroom, making up about a quarter of our U-shaped arrangement. On my right was Abbie, a stunning Korean girl whose smile held mischief. To her right was Claire, the girl who helped me with my coat, and then Justine, a pale blonde, her face determinedly angry. Thirteen boys rimmed the other side.

The Christian College faculty children eyed me briefly with mild curiosity. Their eyes found my boots, and then went back to their long division. They mesmerized me. Third-graders back in public school would ogle the outsider, whine about the math. These children possessed themselves like small-scale adults.

Okay, class, we were just getting ready to recite First Corinthians chapter thirteen. And then they began in unison, all eyes on the front of the room.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am nothing . . .

This is how I came to Waltham, the center of the Protestant Restoration movement. Waltham University became the organizing principle for everything we did or thought about doing. We drank grape juice from modern plastic communion cups to promote proper hygiene, and we supported missionaries to Africa. Nobody went without makeup or wore their hair in a bun, like you might expect of such a place. But we had no infant sprinkling, no school dances, no Jesus statues, no Virgin Mary, and most certainly no pianos, no organs, no harps at church.

In this classroom, a dozen eight-year-old boys held the authority of scriptural backing, a holy people. The rest of us watched them hold their authority. That they were actual children did not occur to me until decades later.

Whose turn is it to lead prayer today? Mrs. Stringer asked. She turned to her chart of boy names on the blackboard and then cocked her gray head sideways. Actually, I think a chain prayer would be nice. Tim, would you start us off?

Boys strung their spiritual phrases in our space like Christmas lights. So our minds were led in a somewhat masculine direction each time we turned our attention to Jehovah. Tim Mannings, whose last name I recognized from his dad’s famous sermons, reprinted in The Gospel Advocate, stood at attention with his perfect little muscular man shape. His brown eyes penetrated and his mouth rarely smiled. He nodded at Mrs. Stringer while we all bowed.

Please, dear God, don’t let Communism rule over our land, he said, gently rocking on the balls of his feet in red Converse sneakers, arms crossed. I peeked at him sideways, my head still bowed. I noted how his legs tensed appropriately to match the military fervor of his entreaty.

Tim’s father was the Jack Mannings. His picture was in Teeny’s Church of Christ magazine. He scared the wits out of her, but she loved his booming voice and his helpful reminders of eternal damnation.

Please, dear God, help the president and all the government officials make the right decisions. The other boys followed Tim’s lead.

Thank you, Lord, for giving us the freedom to worship you, said towheaded Jace Cotton, clearing his throat, and Brent, the shortest one,