Read Online Autobiography of a Fat Bride by Laurie Notaro - Free Book Online Page B

off for Ellen’s place. We were both pretty hungry, though, and stopped for some McEgg thing on the way there, ordering as much as we could with the five dollars we had on us. We had finished gobbling everything just about the time we reached the street the church was on. We made the turn.
    There, behind a wall of blooming oleander bushes, was a parking lot, and as we pulled into it, we noticed that the layout of the place was kind of odd. Scattered about the edge of the lot were numerous little houses, perhaps seven or eight in all, and then what was obviously a main hall. Our car was one of three in the lot.
    “This doesn’t look like a church,” I said quietly.
    “But it sure does look like a compound,” my boyfriend replied.
    “It’s a cult,” I said adamantly. “It’s a cult, they’re trying to recruit us. It’s like Little Guyana or a Branch Davidians franchise. Great. Cult people. Our minister is a Jim Jones.
’Come, children, come, don’t be afraid.’
“
    “Well, what do you want to do?” he asked me.
    “I want to leave,” I answered, looking over both shoulders. “Unless they’ve already surrounded us.”
    “You made an appointment with her,” he argued. “I think we should go in. You said she sounded nice.”
    “Honey, you capture more cult people with honey than you do with vinegar. What do you think she should have said, ‘Hey, did you ever feel the urge to become the sixth child bride of a balding, overweight man with a perspiration problem and big pores, because I can hook you up by sundown’! You know that cult people always make the new recruits drink their own pee!” I reminded him, but he was already out of the car.
    “It can’t hurt to see,” he insisted.
    “Okay, okay.” I gave in. “Your choice. But if anyone hands you Kool-Aid or a loaded rifle, just back away slowly and say nicely, ‘No, thank you,’ and if you see any children dressed in fatigues, don’t say a word, just run to the car.”
    We walked through the doors of the main hall, into a room about as big as a classroom. Several rows of metal folding chairs were set up, occupied by a variety of about fifteen people. In the air hung the undeniable fragrance of old coffee and nicotine residue, a sure signal that cleanliness wasn’t as next to godliness as you’d like to think around these parts. As I looked around, I had the undeniable feeling that I was the Mary Poppins of this group.
    Yep. Mixed-up, brainwashed cult people. Suddenly, the high-fives seemed perfectly acceptable, even downright
cool,
as did the Wave or even the Jerry Springer chant, “Go Jerry! Go Jerry! Go Jerry!” My mother could handle that after we said our vows, I convinced myself, especially if we let her
start
the Wave.
    As soon as we each took a seat, the piano player attacked the keys with the chords of “We Shall Overcome,” and instructed the congregation to come to the front of the room, hold hands in a circle, and sing. In what was clearly an invasion of my personal space, I joined hands with perfect strangers and sang what little I knew of the song, swaying involuntarily with my hands above my head, my right in the clutch of a man wearing an eye patch and my left grasped tightly by a woman missing both her eyeteeth. For all I knew, in an hour I could be married to Bluebeard and forced to follow the orders of his first wife, The Whistler.
    When we very gladly and happily returned to our seats, a basket was passed around (a part of church I had completely forgotten about), and before it got to us, I was able to scavenge the thirteen cents that was left over from our McBrunch and tossed it into the collection. I didn’t feel so bad after I took a peek in the basket and realized that we were apparently the high rollers in this “church,” being that the parishioners donated what they could afford to sacrifice. Along with the bounty of our thirteen cents, the basket boasted a half-smoked GPC cigarette, an origami bird created