Gone Astray
Synopsis
When Dorie Winslow’s daughter, Phoebe, announces that she’s joined Teens for Christ and has been born again, Dorie, a free-thinking, widowed English professor, is appalled. “I knew you were going to the rec center,” she gasps, “but I thought you were playing ping pong, not being dipped in the blood of the lamb."
Determined to deter Phoebe, Dorie unearths a 1970’s journal chronicling her own intimate encounter with a maverick guru. She finally confronts the guilty marital secret that has paralyzed her emotionally, and, when Phoebe suffers a near-fatal accident, rediscovers a personal faith that frees her to love again.
Determined to deter Phoebe, Dorie unearths a 1970’s journal chronicling her own intimate encounter with a maverick guru. She finally confronts the guilty marital secret that has paralyzed her emotionally, and, when Phoebe suffers a near-fatal accident, rediscovers a personal faith that frees her to love again.
First Pages
Dorie Winslow realized too late that she had completely missed the signs that something was seriously wrong with her daughter. A good mother, she chided herself, would have noticed. Even if that good mother were overworked, underpaid and frustrated by her overprivileged and undermotivated students at West Fork State, an institution better known for proximity to three Colorado ski resorts than rigorous academics.
But what had she, an obviously lax mother, done? She’d passed off the dramatic transformation in Phoebe’s wardrobe and CD collection as just another adolescent phase-change, the newest experimental persona in the “who-am-I-this-year” game. After all, pastel baby tees, pink lip gloss, and the surprisingly harmonic music issuing from Phoebe’s room were a welcome change from torn black t-shirts, venous- blood- red lipstick and the discordant mayhem of Marilyn Manson. Dorie never stopped to wonder why her daughter suddenly looked like a throwback to the Eisenhower years instead of a contestant in some Little Miss Goth Pageant.
Then, a few days before Phoebe’s sixteenth birthday, the caca hit the fan. Dorie had made all the arrangements for a blow-out celebration. First, Phoebe and three friends would be treated to a non-extreme makeover, courtesy of Dorie’s neighbor, Sharon Folsom, who sold skin care products whenever she wasn’t trying to keep her twin boy toddlers from murdering each other. Then there would be dinner out at the Grubstake Hotel, West Fork’s premiere historically preserved Victorian hostelry, followed by a movie and a sleepover. Dorie felt she had done herself proud, at least by West Fork standards, which were admittedly low compared to those of her yuppie friends back east who had to shell out major bucks for orchestra seats at Broadway shows. However, B-day was rapidly approaching and she still hadn’t bought Phoebe a present.
Overwhelmed by sentimentality and memories of her own sixteenth birthday, when her father had presented her with a gold charm bracelet ordered from a discount catalogue, Dorie had been considering jewelry, maybe a ring set with a pearl, Phoebe’s June birthstone, but her daughter had such definite tastes that she had hesitated to pick out anything without a consultation.
So, when Phoebe came down the stairs to breakfast the Saturday before her birthday wearing cute little cutoff jean shorts and an aqua tee with a rhinestone heart placed fetchingly over her left breast, Dorie proposed a trip to Weiss’s Jewelry for the bauble of her choice.
“Anything you like, muffin,“she offered magnanimously. When Phoebe beamed, she added, “So long as it doesn’t involve piercing your nostrils, nipples or any unmentionable mucous membranes.”
Phoebe frowned and tucked an errant strand of long brown hair neatly behind her ear.
“Mother,” she said, “that is not my style anymore. That sort of self- mutilation disrespects the body.”
“That’s more or less what I told you when you wanted a barbed wire tattoo on your ankle,” Dorie reminded her.
Phoebe, to her credit, ignored the remark. “Actually,” she said, gathering her hair into a low ponytail and securing it with a scrunchie, “there is something I’ve been wanting.”
“Then you shall have it,” Dorie said, trying to make amends for her verbal jab.
“What I’d really like,” Phoebe said gravely, “ is a little gold cross on an eighteen inch box chain.”
Dorie was surprised. She thought crosses had gone out of style after Madonna took up the Kabbalah, but then she wasn’t really au courant with accessories favored by the young and hip.
“I think, “ Phoebe continued in the same even tone,” that it’s important to show where you stand.” She paused, inhaled, and said, in a vaguely defiant, run-on mumble, “And now that I’ve been born again I need to wear a cross as a symbol of my new life in Christ.”
“Now that you’ve been what?” Dorie said, sloshing tea all over a new handwoven placemat.
“Born again. You know, accepted Jesus as my personal savior.”
Dorie coughed to clear her windpipe of the tea that had gone down the wrong way.
“When exactly did this happen?” she said, “and why have you not told me about it?”
Phoebe heaved a long sigh of terminal exasperation.
“I did tell you. Sort of anyway. You know I’ve been going to the rec center every Friday night with Kimberly.”
Dorie recalled that Phoebe and her new best friend, a chatty blonde cheerleader type who insisted on addressing Dorie as “Ms. Winslow” despite an invitation to use her first name, went down to the municipal recreation center on Friday nights. However, she hadn’t given much thought to what they actually did there. Kimberly and her friends were such an improvement over the spike-haired, ghoulishly eye-shadowed girls that Phoebe hung out with when they first arrived in West Fork a year ago that she was too relieved to ask questions.
“Well, of course I knew you went to the rec center , “ Dorie replied, “but I figured you were playing pingpong, not being dipped in the blood of the lamb. Or whatever,” she added hastily, when Phoebe gave her a black look.
“That’s because you weren’t listening. As usual. I told you I was going to the TFC meetings there.”
“TFC?” Dorie said blankly. “What’s that?”
“Teens for Christ. Kimberly’s the president.”
Dorie took the tea-soaked placemat to the sink and rinsed it while she attempted to process Phoebe’s revelation. It had to be a put-on. She’d raised her daughter on the same masala of Eastern religions peppered with a dash of quantum mechanics that she herself invoked during moments of ecstasy and/or despair. Phoebe couldn’t possibly be serious about this born-again nonsense. Dorie studied her daughter’s face for a telltale sign that this was all a big mother-baiting joke.
“And what exactly goes on at these Teens for Christ meetings?” she asked with a raised eyebrow meant to show that she was on to Phoebe’s ploy.
“First we have Musical Praise Circle. Pastor Charlie plays the harmonica and Jared, this boy I know, he plays guitar. Then we discuss the Scripture of the Week, and then we Witness and then we sing some more and at the end we have refreshments and social hour.”
Phoebe didn’t crack a smile during this recitation and Dorie felt the tiny fingers of incipient panic tickling her chest. Phoebe was serious. A discomfiting vision of her daughter clutching a Bible as she boarded a bus bound for Jesus Camp flashed across Dorie’s mental screen. She had to do something, fast. She could barely manage to relate to Phoebe as it was. Whatever minimal family values they shared would never survive Musical Praise Circles and Witnessing. Not to mention this Pastor Charlie, whoever in hell he was.
Which was Dorie’s next question.
A beatific smile crossed Phoebe’s face.
“He is just the most cool minister on the planet. I mean, he really knows what’s happening.You can tell him anything. Because he listens.”
This last was accompanied by a pointed stare at her mother.
By now Dorie was in such a state of shock that she wasn’t even tempted to defend herself against the implicit accusation of parental inadequacy.
“Phoebe,” she asked, “you don’t really believe that fundamentalist crapola about heaven and angels and hellfire and brimstone? “
Phoebe turned away and opened the refrigerator.
“I knew you’d be like this, “ she said. “You’re always so ...so....” She searched for a suitably damning adjective as she extracted a carton of banana yoghurt.
“Cynical,” she finished, and grabbed a spoon from the table and clomped upstairs.
Dorie poured herself another cup of tea and sat down to reflect on the state of the mother-daughter union. She’d given up coffee as part of a campaign to combat perimenopausal irritability so that she could better cope with Phoebe’s mood swings but now she was addicted to an expensive Irish breakfast tea ordered from an intimidatingly refined tea company in Massachussetts and her nerves were as frazzled as ever.