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  Josh didn’t share my sympathy toward the chickens, challenging me to play a game he called “chicken head baseball” whenever it was butchering day. The object was to see who could hit one of the recently removed chicken heads the farthest with a metal baseball bat. As grotesque as it was, this is actually one of the better memories I have of the time I spent growing up with Josh.

  The worst involves a night we were left alone at home when I was twelve and he was fourteen. We’d spent the previous day picking huckleberries in the mountains, and our chore that evening was to clean them and store them in Ziploc bags in the freezer. Rolling the berries from one hand to the other, we picked out any stems or leaves, then dropped the berries into a measuring cup and poured them into the bags. Besides school, chores, and baseball, Josh and I didn’t have very much in common, so our conversation while cleaning the berries was unremarkable until we got on the subject of dating. I had a crush on one of Josh’s friends, but my brother informed me that I didn’t stand a chance with him because he loved to suck on boobs and I was severely lacking in that department.

  His comment bruised my training-bra ego. “I do so have boobs!”

  “Yeah, right. Then let’s see ’em.”

  The idea that I might have to back up my statement with proof hadn’t occurred to me. A lump of anxiety formed in my throat as I thought about my body being exposed. Josh started chasing me around the dining room table, and I ran away from him, half screaming, half laughing. To me it was a game, not unlike chicken head baseball. I ran clockwise, then counterclockwise, until I grew exhausted and his catching me came to feel inevitable. In a desperate attempt to keep him at bay, I grabbed a handful of huckleberries from the mound on the table and threw them at him. He responded by grabbing a handful of his own and throwing them at me before resuming his pursuit of me. When he finally caught me, he brought me to the floor with a well-executed tackle and pinned my arms down with his knees. This was standard brother–sister stuff. I expected him to tickle me or dangle spit from his lips over my face. I did not anticipate him pulling up my shirt and bra and sucking on my nipples.

  I fought to get away from him but couldn’t. I was in tears. I was in shock. I was in Hell. Only after the buzzing in my head subsided enough for me to comprehend what was going on did I notice the look of disgust on his face. “Like I said, your boobs aren’t big enough to satisfy a man.” He took his knees off my arms and let me go.

  I ran to the bathroom and cried. When I returned, I couldn’t look at Josh. I could only stare at the purple stains on the dining room’s white walls, where the huckleberries we’d thrown had splattered. I felt numb, but I knew that if Larry and Ruthanne saw those stains Josh and I would be severely punished. Expecting them to return home any minute, we worked together to clean up the stains, but they wouldn’t come off the walls, no matter how hard we scrubbed. Finally, in an act of desperation, I rifled through one of the kitchen drawers, found a bottle of Liquid Paper, and used the miniature brush attached to the underside of the cap to apply several coats over the stains on the wall, finishing just as Larry and Ruthanne pulled into the garage.

  The stain left upon my body and mind by the events of that evening has been much harder to remove.

  Chapter Seven

  Thirteen I

  THE YEAR I TURNED THIRTEEN was full of upheaval and major changes in my life. Like many girls, I got my first period, and soon afterward Ruthanne declared that I was too old to be spanked. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I was practically a woman.

  She also put an end to the awkward tickling sessions Larry would make me endure from time to time. He liked to poke me in the ribs whenever I walked by him or pat me on the butt with his hand, especially in the evening right before bedtime. I would say, “Stop it, Papa,” but he would continue to do it anyway, and eventually he would pin me down on the living room carpet and tickle my armpits and neck with his bearded chin. As I tried to squirm away and he prevented me from doing so, he would inevitably come in contact with my budding breasts, and it didn’t feel right to me, a sentiment amplified by the lingering effects of my uncomfortable experience with Josh. According to Ruthanne, I was too “developed” for this sort of horseplay, and while her injunction was a positive development, I still felt disconnected from everyone in my life, including—perhaps especially—her and Larry, who I felt were different from me in ways I was unable to articulate. I felt like no one understood me and I was stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be.

  Sports provided me with a much-needed diversion. I played volleyball, basketball, and softball, as well as ran track, and I excelled in all of them. My serve in volleyball was nearly unreturnable, and largely because of it I was named the MVP of my team, even though, like Larry and Ruthanne, I wasn’t very tall. My lack of height should have worked against me in basketball, but as my team’s point guard, I was a great ball handler and was named MVP of that team as well. But my best sport was softball. Larry was a huge baseball fan, Josh played through high school and into college, and I played tee-ball, Little League, and, eventually, fast-pitch softball. I started out at second base, then briefly tried shortstop before landing in the position that suited me best, catcher. I routinely picked off runners who were trying to steal second base, wasn’t afraid to dive for foul balls, and was an accomplished hitter and base runner.

  When I returned to the local junior high for eighth grade, I was met with an increasing amount of peer pressure, as my classmates had begun dating each other and Larry and Ruthanne didn’t allow me to participate. They only approved of “courtship,” a period of time during which a man and a woman seek to determine if it’s God’s will for them to marry each other. Larry and Ruthanne also made me stay home from school on days when sex education was taught because they were convinced that it encouraged fornication, and fornication led to Hell. I was supposed to be a virgin when I got married, so, according to them, I didn’t need to know anything about sex until I had a husband. By effectively keeping me cloistered in a nunnery, they succeeded only in making me laughably ignorant. Ruthanne believed using maxi pads during your period was good enough, but the girls I played sports with used tampons, so I wanted to as well. I bought one for a quarter in a public restroom, but unable to figure out how to insert it, I convinced myself I didn’t have a vagina.

  This incident was quickly overshadowed by an increasing number of uncomfortable social encounters, most of which involved me getting mocked for being such a diehard Christian. I felt like I was caught between two very different worlds, home and school, and while I really didn’t belong in either place, I had to choose one. With the threat of eternal damnation weighing heavily on my mind, I resumed trying to sell my homeschooling plan to Larry until he couldn’t take it anymore. As my school’s first-quarter term was coming to an end, he offered me a deal: If I could finish the entire eighth-grade curriculum offered by CLASS in the three quarters of the school year that remained, he would allow me to choose which educational option (public school or homeschool) I preferred for high school. But, he warned me, once I’d made a decision, that was it. There would be no going back.

  I didn’t flinch. I took the California Achievement Test for every subject and had CLASS send me the curriculum for the level at which I’d tested. I had to take a biology class meant for high school sophomores as well as twelve other subjects. It was a grueling challenge that required me to read stacks and stacks of thick textbooks and to write perfectly in cursive—penmanship was graded—but I managed to pull it off.

  When I started homeschooling, I asked the principal at the junior high in Troy if I could continue to play sports there. When he said no, I had to quit playing basketball and volleyball and running track. Only two outlets for physical activity remained for me. As soon as Harold, the puppy I’d adopted, was big enough, I took him running with me under the power line that ran across the mountain behind our house. I was also able to play fast-pitch softball in the public summer league in Libby, but even this would soon
be taken from me.

  In my family, I bore the burden of constantly being compared to my great-grandmother, who’d died when I was eight. Her funeral is the only one I’ve ever been to that made me feel genuinely sad. She was quite a woman, possessing many of the qualities I would come to admire, including independence, creativity, and willpower. These traits were frowned upon in my family because they were considered rebellions against God and I was often told that I possessed all three. According to our family’s history, my great-grandmother was, at least partly, Native American, with roots in the Hunkpapa division of the Lakota tribe. She was also known as a woman about town, always wearing hats with veils, dress gloves, costume jewelry, and bright red lipstick, and marrying and divorcing four different men.

  To prevent me from ending up like her, I suppose, Larry and Ruthanne forbade me from wearing makeup or cutting my hair when I was a teenager. I also couldn’t braid it. They’d reference a verse of Scripture (1 Corinthians 11:15) that describes a woman’s long hair being her “glory” and suggests it’s sinful for a woman to cut or braid her hair. When I was a little girl, it hadn’t mattered so much if I cut my bangs or braided my hair, but now that I was a woman, modesty was essential.

  I was expected to maintain a chaste appearance at home. Ruthanne and I were made to wear discreet dresses that covered nearly every inch of our skin besides our hands and faces. Meanwhile, Larry and Josh got to walk around shirtless—sometimes even pantsless—whenever they pleased. Larry treated our home like his own private nudist colony. His penis was the first I ever saw, and, unfortunately, I saw it a lot. That the men in our family got to traipse around naked, while I had to wear outfits that resembled those favored by Mennonite women, taught me at a very young age to feel guilty about my appearance and contributed to me developing all sorts of body image issues down the road. Ruthanne prohibited me from wearing pants because, as she explained to me, “Pants separate a woman’s legs, and that tempts men to want to have intercourse with you.” I was only to wear skirts or dresses, otherwise I would be disobeying God’s desire for women to be modest. Not wanting to defy God or—gulp—get raped, I did as I was told, but this new rule presented some difficulties. To do yard work, for example, I had to wear pants underneath a dress because the wind might lift the dress or a branch might snag it and reveal too much of my body. Larry and Ruthanne didn’t always see eye to eye, and my wearing pants was one of the things they viewed differently. Larry would occasionally let me wear pants while I was hiking or doing yard work, but I always felt guilty afterward.

  Because of Ruthanne’s prohibition against pants, playing softball became problematic for me. The sport required that I wear pants that fell just below the knee and hugged the contours of my body, and in Ruthanne’s view my round buttocks and strong thighs might lead any men or boys who saw me to temptation. And who knew what sort of lascivious thoughts the umpire, who stood right behind me when I played catcher, was thinking? I could practically feel him breathing on the back of my neck as I squatted behind home plate. Feeling like a sinner for having such an immodest pastime and fearing the wrath of God, I quit the last sport that had been available to me and the one I’d loved the most.

  Now that I was homeschooling and not playing softball anymore, I started spending nearly all my time at home, which, as I would soon come to discover, made me perfectly suited for a job I never asked for nor ever expected to have: full-time stay-at-home nanny.

  Chapter Eight

  Adopting Ezra

  AFTER CHURCH ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Larry and Ruthanne made a shocking announcement. They’d heard a call from God to “save the children from the War on the Unborn” and were going to start adopting babies. Later I overheard them having a conversation that hinted at the real reason for their seemingly altruistic endeavor. On the verge of losing one of their dependents—Josh was about to graduate from high school—they saw adoption as a way to avoid (or, at the very least, limit) paying taxes to a government they blamed for subsidizing abortions.

  Their plan was to start adopting children as soon as possible, but they quickly discovered that the wait was much longer and the cost much higher than they’d expected. For white babies, that is. Perhaps no place is our culture’s racism more apparent than the adoption of babies whose availability and market value generally reflects their worth in our society’s eyes. It can take as long as five years to adopt a white baby and cost as much as fifty thousand dollars, whereas Black babies can be adopted quickly and cheaply. While other factors are involved, including the basic economic principle of supply and demand, it’s the role of demand in this scenario that hints at a simple but painful truth: in our culture, white babies are more valued than Black babies.

  When Larry and Ruthanne learned how much quicker and cheaper it was to adopt babies with darker skin, they expressed a willingness to take any baby as long as it wasn’t born with any physical disabilities. After all, physically disabled children would not be able to shoulder the heavy workload required of those who lived under their roof.

  After completing the arduous application process, with its tedious paperwork and numerous home visits, we got a call telling us that a pregnant woman in Kansas City, Missouri, was looking to put her baby up for adoption. The one catch was that the woman had some developmental disabilities, so there was a chance her baby could be disabled as well. Larry was so disturbed by the news and the dilemma it presented, he cried. After praying on it, he and Ruthanne decided to move forward and sign the paperwork.

  Alexander Joe was born January 13, 1993. Upon getting the news, Larry, Ruthanne, and I piled into our Volvo and drove twenty-four hours straight to Kansas City. Having just acquired my learner’s permit, I shared the driving duties with Larry, while Ruthanne served as copilot. With one foot out the door on his way to college, Josh hadn’t contributed much to the conversations about adoption and didn’t make the trip. In the paperwork we were given at the hospital, the baby’s mother, who was white, had written that she had been unable to locate the father but did provide a description of the man: “tall and Black.” She was only four foot nine, so how tall her baby would turn out to be was anyone’s guess.

  I was a big sister all of a sudden, and as such, Larry and Ruthanne included me in the process of picking a new name for the baby—within strict parameters specified by Larry, of course. The first name had to come from the Bible and contain one “z,” which Larry thought would look catchy when paired with Doležal, and the middle name had to start with the letter “a,” in keeping with our family’s custom. (Ruthanne presented the only exception to the latter rule, as she’d combined her first name and middle name to form a single name.) Taking the task seriously, I scoured the Bible in search of names that contained a “z” and made a list of the more memorable ones. There was no shortage of them, so I culled the ones that were too hard to pronounce or had less-than-pleasant meanings. For the middle name, I combed through books full of baby names looking for ones that not only began with “a” but also fit well with the first names I’d written down. Once I’d amassed a long list of suitable names, we voted on them, and that’s how Alexander Joe became Ezra Anders. We were now what’s come to be known as a transracial family, one where the parents had a different racial classification than the child (or children) they’d adopted.

  Ezra’s arrival demanded that everyone in our family take on additional work. Unlike most girls my age, my teenage years were only briefly consumed with thoughts about boys. From the time Ezra arrived at our house, I was focused almost solely on doing my part to ensure his health and happiness. My already long list of chores expanded to include making cloth diapers out of bolts of flannel, changing said diapers, rocking Ezra back to sleep in the middle of the night, using a Happy Baby food grinder to make his meals, and, once I’d gotten my driver’s license, driving into town to go grocery shopping—in short, many of the things parents are supposed to do.

  When Ruthanne developed something like chronic fatigue syndrome, I
became the pinch hitter, a second mom who, unlike the first one, was always on call. To get my homework done, I had to wake up before the sun and work nonstop until long after it went down. I could have easily grown resentful, but I didn’t. After all, if I was going to be a good Christian woman, someday I would marry and have babies of my own, and Ezra was providing me with excellent practice. Besides, I absolutely adored him.

  Because I was taking such an active role in his care, I grew very protective of Ezra. He was a very sweet and very bright boy who smiled easily, and I just wanted to wrap him in my arms and shield him from anything that could potentially hurt him. At first I was mostly concerned about him hitting his head on the underside of a table or chair or putting something harmful in his mouth, but as he grew I came to understand that it was just as important for me to act as a buffer between him and ignorance, particularly when the source of that ignorance was my own family.

  As Ezra’s first Christmas with us approached, my maternal grandmother, Grandma Schertel, seemed genuinely befuddled when it came to buying him a present—as if the toys he’d want to play with might somehow be different than those desired by white children his age. “I just don’t know what to get him,” she said, throwing her hands in the air in frustration. “What do Black children like? I know, I could get him a drum!”

  From books I’d borrowed from the library, I’d read about racism enough to understand the basic stereotypes and I could almost visualize her thoughts: half-naked Africans dancing around a fire to the sound of beating drums. Apparently, even babies weren’t exempt from this sort of profiling.