EXCERPT: Worldly Girls by Tamara Jong

Excerpted with permission from book*hug Press

“Triptych: What We Get to Keep”

When I was in kindergarten I wrote a story about my family.

There wasn’t much of a plot. I depicted them as tiny, smiling,

round-headed people obsessed with cleaning. I drew detailed

pictures of our plumbing, the car, the oven — even the coin-operated

laundromat in our building, the dryer visibly tumbling

clothes round and round.

In the story, my sister sorts the chaos of shoes near the front

door of our tiny apartment. I’m at the kitchen counter putting

away dishes, while Ma, with a drawn-on smile, is vacuuming

the rug, little speckles of loose dirt making their way up into

her treasured humming beige Electrolux. (I would eventually

inherit Ma’s drawn-on smile, among other things.) My brother

only appeared on the cover, too tiny to contribute.

Ma and us girls were in dresses because, for those growing

up Jehovah’s Witness, the teachings advised that “women

should adorn themselves in appropriate dress, with modesty

and soundness of mind . . . but in the way that is proper for

women professing devotion to God, namely, through good

works” (1 Tim. 2:9, 10).

· · ·

My father always told us about everything that needed to be

cleaned and what needed to be avoided altogether: money,

shoes, motel rooms, beds, bathrooms, door handles, and my

uncles, Ma’s brothers.

“Don’t hug or kiss them,” he would say.

We once saw our Uncle Alec blow his nose into a paper bag

and throw the bag under our coffee table. Alec would play silly

card games with me when he visited, which was never really for

long. He was probably passing the time before going back to

New Waterford. Ma was always wanting to help her brothers —

or anyone really. That was always her way, which may have

attracted her to the ministry in the first place.

Of all our assigned chores, I liked vacuuming the most.

Something about it calmed me, the way it drowned out the

world and sucked away all the filth. The sound of the dirt going

up through the hose was so satisfying, even if the carpets and

floors would only be clean for a few hours. My father bought

the vacuum from a door-to-door salesman, and it cost a lot of

money on some kind of payment plan.

When Ma was younger she used to wipe her bum with old

newspapers in the family’s outhouse, and her brothers and sisters

had to share shoes so they could take turns going to school.

Ma was so proud of that vacuum. She must have thought she’d

finally made it.

· · ·

I was twenty when Ma drowned in Cancun, and her prized possession,

her vacuum, came to me. Of course, I also got other

things when she died: jewelry, childhood photographs, a sectional

couch, some household items, and her unpublished poetry.

My sister never asked for any of Ma’s things. When she later

asked to borrow Ma’s vacuum cleaner for a while, I didn’t hesitate.

When I wanted it back, she told me it didn’t work anymore

and was beyond repair.

It would be years before I got another vacuum. When I did,

it wasn’t new, just someone else’s second-best, which I rightly

deserved.

II.

“Do not think I came to bring peace to the earth; I came to

bring, not peace to the earth; but a sword. For I came to cause

division, with a man against his father, a daughter against her

mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Indeed, a man’s enemies will be persons of his own household.

Whoever has greater affection for father or mother than for

me is not worthy of me; and whoever has great affection for

son or daughter than for me is not worthy of me” (Matt.

10:34–37).

· · ·

When I was little, Ma was ministering to a sister from Kingdom

Hall whose husband had been disfellowshipped and expelled

from our congregation. When my sister, brother, and I played

hide-and-seek, the husband scooped me up in his arms to hide

me in a good place. Since I didn’t want to be “a sharer in his wicked

works” (2 John 1:11), I didn’t say a peep to him. I was good at following

the rules.

When Ma got disfellowshipped for smoking, Ray, a longtime

elder and friend of the family, called me before the official

announcement. I cried while holding hands with my friend

Natasha at the closing prayer. I knew that if Armageddon came

tomorrow, Ma would be washed away with the rest of the

wicked world because she no longer had the mark that Ezekiel

9:4 speaks of.

“Jehovah said to him: ‘Go through the city, through Jerusalem,

and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who are sighing

and groaning over all the detestable things that are being done in

the city.’”

Ma had survived a terrible childhood but couldn’t part with

her Du Mauriers.

When I turned eighteen, my sister and I moved out. Since I

recently became a full-time minister, I had to protect my spiritual

life and heart from Ma. Jehovah had always been my constant,

and I owed Him this. Prayers and hopes for Ma’s repentance and

a return to Jehovah and His loving congregation never came.

The last time I saw Ma alive, we didn’t speak. We were both

in Montréal, in the underground tunnel leading to the Métro

Henri-Bourassa.

Ma was going to her job at a nursing home,

and I was heading back to Laval after my cleaning job. It was

rush hour, just another mundane morning, and people were

shuffling past one another.

I hadn’t seen Ma for months and now here she was, standing

right in front of me, waving. I wasn’t at all prepared to shun her

and was mindful of Apostle Matthew’s words — “the spirit of

course, is eager, but the flesh is weak.” My mind often works in the

scriptures. I felt closest to Matthew, a despised tax collector who

sacrificed everything to follow his Lord. When Matthew scribed

Jesus’s life, there was a contradiction; Jesus was to fulfill prophecy

by dying for humanity, yet he asked for the cup to be taken away,

crying out to God in his final moments. Maybe I wanted to tell

my Witness friends that I kept going, that Ma repented because

I maintained my integrity.

I would write and rewrite this scene in the subway many

times in the years that followed, but I rarely told anyone that

I waved back.

III.

I have been recently hospitalized for depression, just like Ma

was, except I’m thirty-two and she was thirty-eight. I never

thought I would end up where she had been — me, the ideal

workaholic, a Kingdom Hall–going Jehovah’s Witness.

But here I am, back in my friend Robin’s house, on the hard

blue cement floor of the bathroom, with the door shut, plucking

out my sparse arm hairs one by one with my good set of

tweezers, something that always seems to relax me.

Time moves slower. My mornings and nights are unscheduled,

seemingly unending. I barely pray or study, and there are

nightmares.

I go to three weekly Bible meetings at the Kingdom Hall

because Robin refuses to leave me at home alone. I can’t blame

her after I tried to hang myself in her basement, which is what

got me hospitalized in the first place. I wonder if things would

have been different if I hadn’t said anything.

I’m not much different than teenage me — I need to always

have that best friend. There were times when I didn’t have one,

and I was so lonely. I wonder how much of a burden I am to

Robin, who is now livid on the other side of the bathroom door.

She’s mad because I took apart her vacuum, piece by piece.

I worked my way through the filter and motor, and gave them a

good scrub, but now it won’t work. She is yelling at me, and I

barely understand what she’s saying, yelling back at her to leave

me alone. I don’t normally yell. My nerves aren’t great; I am

visibly shaking.

I remember once Ma chased me and Tommy with a butter

knife down our apartment hall to the bathroom. We both ran,

screaming the whole time, and scrambled to lock the door.

I rarely cry these days, but today the tears I’ve held in all year

don’t want to stop.

Robin is afraid I’ll hurt myself. Of course, she is right to

worry and now refuses to leave. I know I can’t win this argument

with her, so I push past her out of the bathroom and curl

myself into a loose ball on my bed in a dark corner of this dingy

little basement. The light from the bathroom lets me see the outline

of her body, and I feel her sit at the foot of my bed. But

we’re still so far apart.

There’s a brief moment when I think, God, when was the last

time we even laughed together? Gone are the nights we stayed

up talking until dawn. We are strangers now. Robin stopped

telling me important things — how her marriage was falling

apart, and she had started to fall apart too. At thirty-two, I didn’t

know that I’d be leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses in five years.

I didn’t know that my faith in God would wane and fade.

I didn’t think I’d be losing Robin.

I was trying to repair the vacuum, but I knew nothing about

vacuums. I didn’t know that I never would be able to fix what

I had taken apart.