Dreaming of Paris

October 18, 2009

Growing up in the Worldwide Church of God, I celebrated Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles every autumn with my parents and siblings. Along with all of the other church members, we drove to one of the various feast sites where the church had erected a large tabernacle building and in which thousands of hard, folding chairs had been set up for the two-hour morning and afternoon sermons that preached the coming end of the world.

I usually spent the feast with my friend, Alise, whom I’d met in church when I was 11 and she was 13. I well remember that Saturday when, after church services (which probably entailed a sermon on how Roe v. Wade and the proposed ERA amendment were sure to destroy families), my family went to Alise’s house for lunch.

Alise had fuzzy-curly auburn hair and pale skin but her name, pronounced “A-lees,” was exotic and foreign. I wanted that touch of the foreign. I aspired to black hair, dark, flashing eyes and olive-colored skin. When I looked in the mirror, it was always a start, a disappointment, to see pale skin and blonde hair peering back at me. My external looks were not at all in keeping with the internal, mysterious, gypsy vision I had of myself.

Alise said, “Wanna come up and see my room?” and I, rather shyly, said okay. Her room contained an old desk on which were a blue Emily Post book of etiquette, a notebook, and a grayish-brown, small plastic typewriter with a cover, which I thought was the oddest but most thrilling thing for a child to own. Chicken crates were nailed on the wall as makeshift bookcases, and in them were some of my favorite books: Little Men and Little Women and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew series.

In a voice filled with import and excitement, Alise showed me the house she had constructed from a cardboard box. She’d divided it up into rooms, and in each room she had placed various items she’d found around her house – little scraps of fabric for rugs and curtains. “Here’s the bathroom, and here’s how I’m gonna decorate my house in Paris,” Alise announced with complete aplomb and confidence. She pulled out several folders with pictures that she’d cut from magazines. In it were fancy chandeliers, gold-plated faucets, Persian carpets, ornate furniture and heavy drapes. Her bathrooms, she explained, would all have gold faucets and gold bathtubs, and the walls would be purple. “What about your house? What’s it gonna look like?” she asked.

I had not given the slightest thought to my house. When I imagined myself as an adult, I never fantasized the house itself, but rather the freedom to read all night, to travel beyond Indiana, to get into a car and drive and drive, as we did on those endless road trips to the Feast of Tabernacles every year. In any case, Jesus was returning soon, maybe in 1975, as Alise well knew, so I didn’t understand why she was dwelling on either her future or her house. The End Times and the Great Tribulation, not Paris, that was our future.

“What are you gonna be when you get big?” Alise continued, in that excited way she had of talking, much as she would in later years say to me, out of the blue, “Do you think there’s a dead body in the trunk of that car?” as if this were just the most fun thing she could think of. “I’m gonna be like Barbara Walters,” she continued. “I’m gonna be a television newscaster. And I’m gonna live in Paris.”

Alise was definitely weird. She wanted to have a career, not be a wife and mother. Had she not been paying attention to the sermons? God had ordained special roles for women, and terrible trouble occurred when women forgot or rebelled against their roles. Not only did Alise harbor these aspirations, but she admitted them, shared them with me. Dreaming and expecting something for yourself was practically not Christian. It was unseemly, embarrassing; desires were private matters, never exposed to anyone else, because they might laugh at you or think you pathetic or silly. Yet here was this wild, gypsy girl who was brave enough to voice her fantasies out loud and proud, as if, in saying them, her dreams might come true.

Alise’s daring was intoxicating and encouraging. I decided to take the plunge and confess my own, until then, barely-formulated ambition: “I’m going to be a writer,” I said.

Over time, partly as a result of listening to Alise’s big plans for her life, I came to realize that I wanted more. Not, I hasten to add, that I deserved more, but I wanted more. I wanted to know more, to understand more, to meet more people from different backgrounds. I wanted the world, which was pagan and demon infested, but I-wanted-it!

This year, I spent the last two days of the Feast of Tabernacles with Alise. This time, the Feast of Tabernacles for me was Sukkot, a celebration of harvest and blessings. Her dream of becoming Barbara Walters and living in Paris never came true. She’s left the church as well, and become a pharmacist, which contains its own perversity, given the fact that the church to which we once belonged banned medicine for a long time.

Not only did she never live in Paris, Alise had never even been there. Thirty-seven years after Alise introduced me to her gold faucets in her Parisian bathroom, I went to Paris with the original dreamer from whom I learned it was okay to dream of a future.

Dreaming of Paris

Angela Himsel

Life and Action