Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck

sandals and surrounded
     by multicolored children. I had never seen multicolored children before. We had to drive all the way to Battle Creek just
     to see black people. I never questioned that Jesus was a blue-eyed blond. I was a little confused about where all of those
     Jews came from and why they killed him, thus damning themselves to Hell with my dancing, swearing parents, but my first true,
     heartfelt quarrel with the Free Methodists had to do with innocence.
    The world was full of heathens. I knew this, because the Free Methodists were always raising money to send out missionaries
     to save the heathens. Heathens were heathens because they worshipped craven gods, or graven images or particularly fat calves.
     One could be born a heathen, grow up a heathen, be abducted and sent to heathen Sunday school by next-door-neighbor, well-meaning
     heathens, and eventually die a heathen without ever knowing or ever hearing of the One True God … and when you died and met
     St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he would send you directly to Hell. Even if you were a good heathen. Even if you brushed your
     teeth: if you did not know Jesus Christ, if you did not accept Jesus Christ as your savior—even if no one ever introduced
     you—if you were not SAVED by the Lord … do not pass “go,” do not collect $200, go directly to Hell. I could accept that people—
     even my parents—might be told about being saved by Jesus and just stubbornly decide not to anyway, and they might actually
     … sort of, maybe … deserve to boil for a while—but I could not see the justice in damning all of those children who were already
     starving for my vegetables and plagued by pestilence and disease. It seemed to me that a child who actually WANTED to eat
     canned asparagus deserved a better afterlife.
    I hated getting up on Sunday mornings.
    I unjoined the Free Methodist Church.
    It is the peculiar nature of the way I think that while I, personally, do not believe much of anything I was taught in the
     Free Methodist Church, I am uncomfortable in most formal religious settings, and “Our Father, who art in heaven. …” makes
     me nervous. I have a distinct and irrational panic reaction to conversations that begin, “I am a Christian and I have been
     saved …” It seems not to ever occur to me that for every Bible-thumping fundamentalist, there may be ten laid-back New Testament
     Christians who believe Christ was about love and forgiveness and listening to your own inner voice above the noise in the
     street. I have made my own peace with God, as I perceive God to be. I have accepted Christ—if nothing else—as a far better
     person than I will ever be.
    I have not yet made my peace with church.

second standard
    A hundred years
    was Sleeping Beauty
    sleeping
    before Prince Charming
    came
    and what was the
    consolation prize
    for waiting
    but what the chambermaid
    was getting
    while Sleeping Beauty
    slept.

our house
    W HEN I WAS VERY SMALL I lived in the little bedroom next to my parents’ room. I approved heartily of the location, but I do not have particularly
     fond memories of the room itself. For one, it harbored a huge dark green wardrobe I was forbidden to look inside, which therefore
     hid lions and tigers and hostile elephants. I was prone to nightmares as a child and it was not uncommon for the bears and
     the tigers to start crawling out of the top of the wardrobe and vault across the room onto my bed and try to maul me in my
     sleep. I would wake up in hysterics and my mother would come running into the room to find out why I was crying and even when
     I pointed out the lions she never once saw one.
    Even better, the room was papered with a variety of scenes of hostile dwarves, something along the line of Rumplestiltskin,
     and although it was not a large room, there were probably about a hundred mad dwarves surrounding me. My mother was fond of
     reading to me and she read any number of stories involving dwarves. Until