Kissing Doorknobs Read Free

Anna.
    Keesha shook her head apprehensively.
    We were being trained for various disasters the adults believed might befall us, like a war, a fire, a hurricane or a hostage crisis. My worst fears and gloomiest thoughts were being substantiated. The worst could happen while I was at school, separated from my family. I’d be alone. Dying, suffering, suffocating … by myself.
    “Tara Sullivan! Don’t cry, honey,” said myriad kind-facedteachers who, I believed, thought of teaching as a mission, a calling or at least a room to go to where they could be the boss. “Come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
    I didn’t look up. I didn’t stop crying. Like a terrified animal, I froze in place.
    “Tara! Look. No one else is crying. It’s just practice. It’s not real.”
    Practice.
I wondered when we would use this ability to crouch on the floor with our hands over our heads. Tomorrow? In fifth grade? In high school? What were they thinking? I kept crying and worrying, worrying and crying.
    There were a lot of parent-teacher and parent-counselor meetings about my fears, but no one seemed to feel confident about what to do. Everyone hoped I’d grow out of my “constant fretting,” or “worrywarting,” as my mother called it. As I grew older, though, my fears got worse. And so, unable to rely on any of the adults in my life to save me from my terrors about this world, I turned my attention to God and the next world.
    Although my mother was not religious, my father was Irish and very Catholic. They had split the difference by sending me to public school enhanced by weekly catechism lessons starting in first grade. I’m sure neither of them could have guessed how seriously I would take my Catholicism.
    From the first class, I worried about original sin, which comes from being born a human after Adam and Eve screwed up in the Garden of Eden. According to my catechism, only baptism could erase original sin. But I reasoned that if that was true, zillions of good butunbaptized people might not get into heaven. How could that be fair?
    I also worried about unbaptized babies who had died. Then I worried about abortions. I wanted to collect all the aborted fetuses in the world and have them baptized to make sure the little souls got into heaven even though their fully formed bodies never made it to earth. By fourth grade, I didn’t care about prochoice or prolife, but I was extremely proafterlife.
    I worried about death and heaven and Judgment Day. I worried about shame, wretchedness, paralysis, disease and accidents.
    I didn’t like passing by the giant crucifix looming above the altar of our big old dimly lit church. It made me scared and sad. Furthermore, since we’d been taught that Christ died for our sins, I was afraid I had had some hand in his pain. Even if Christ was crucified thousands of years before I was born, I still felt queasy about my role in his terrible suffering.
    It was just as hard to look at the statues of the Blessed Virgin and Joseph: I could never meet their gazes. You just can’t crucify a child and then hang out with the parents—even if they are statues.
    I hated the confessionals. Three dark little coffin-sized closets nailed together and hooded with dusty velvet curtains standing along each side of the pews. Not very inviting. Not very … forgiving.
    Inside the two side cubicles, there was enough room for one person to kneel. In the middle there was enough room for a priest to sit without a lot of discomfort—assuming that he wasn’t claustrophobic. There were tiny screened doors cut into the partitions between the priest and each penitent.
    Once I was inside the confessional, dread danced a jig in my nervous system. My entire soul cringed with fear. The darkness and stale air were stifling. I kept my terror in check by listening to the muffled murmurs of somebody else’s sins.
    When the priest finally slid open the shoebox-sized door and let me know he was ready for me, I moved my lips