Baptism

My dim reflection overlapped with the fish in the tank. It was like a Venn Diagram—I’d just learned about those in school—and the middle part was a blurry mix of me and fish. Its gold scales flashed across my cheek. I tried to imagine what the water would feel like against gills. Water would trickle through me, not just around my body the way it did in the pool at the rec center. It wouldn’t soak my clothes.

Another thing I’d just learned about was swim bladders. It sounded gross but it wasn’t really. This kind of bladder filled up with just air so the fish could be lighter and wouldn’t sink. I thought maybe a swim bladder would help me lose weight for the next time Mom coaxed me onto the scale. But it could also make my belly bigger with all that air, so, on second thought, maybe it wouldn’t help anything.

I stepped away from the tank and looked around at the pews. Was it a sin to think about being a fish? I catalogued the thought in my tally of sins, which I kept in my head. It was a good way of knowing whether I was doing okay. Pastor Timothy said that we had to work really, really hard to be okay people, and it was an “uphill battle” against The Devil to do the right thing. Every good step I took was like progress up the hill. Every bad step made me slide backward. I knew it was technically a battle, but I didn’t like imagining myself with a gun, so I put this self—the me that was climbing the hill—in the Armor of God. Not the breastplate, though. That was a naughty word. 

I thought maybe that was why Mom did her checks with the bathroom scale. She didn’t want me to be so heavy that I fell down the whole mountain and into hell. That felt like a thing that could happen if I wasn’t careful.

Anyway, I decided the whole being-a-fish thing was probably neutral. I could be one of those see-through fish, with its guts out in the open, including the swim bladder. Then God could see right through me to my sins and I wouldn’t have to keep track for Him. 

It mattered less today, though. I was going to be made clean and innocent like a flower in the snow with no thorns. I would wrap myself in my new white gown and plug my nose so the cold water wouldn’t choke me, and I’d shut my eyes tight. 

I knew that some people got baptized as babies. My friend Marisa had it done when she was a month old. I wondered how her parents knew she wanted it. If they noticed some kind of sign in her pudgy baby face or wrinkly baby fingers. I’d told my parents I wanted to get baptized because they’d asked me, and it sounded like a push in the right direction. I liked water. I liked God, too, I guess—or Jesus. I could never tell the difference when church people talked about them. Marisa would say there weren't just the two of them, there were three, and the third was some kind of ghost. I never pushed against this when she talked about it, because Marisa was the kind of person to believe in ghosts. I thought of her like an untamed horse in one of those books about girls who run away from their families. “But, Papa, no one understands this wild mare like I do.” You know the genre. Marisa was the mare. She spent her school nights on the lacrosse field or rehearsing for the next play. A single hair tie always pressed into her wrist, mandated by her mother, though I never saw Marisa without her dark curls bouncing free as she walked.

It wasn’t a school night now. It was Sunday morning, but Marisa still wasn’t going to come to my baptism. She didn’t go to Sunday Mass with her family, so she didn’t even have that excuse. “I just don’t think I should attend,” she’d told me on the phone. It stung. She was the person whose opinion of me meant the most—aside from God’s, but He’s not a person. Even if her parents let her be an atheist, and they let her skip out on confession, didn’t she want to see me become instantly better and cleaner and more worthy? I wanted her to see it. 

At last, my Bible School mentor, Scott, came into the room from his meeting with my parents. The light from the fish tank glowed over him, all eerie, like a beam from a UFO. He and my parents met me behind the rows of pews. “You ready to get dunked?” Scott held out his palms so I had to high-five them. “Remember your verses?” He asked me this like he expected me not to, even though we’d practiced nonstop for the last month.

I knew all my verses and I wanted to be an okay person. That was all that mattered. Yes, I had some secrets, like the paint-ruined shirt I’d stuffed behind my bed to hide it. Or how often I thought about hugging Marisa tight and never letting her go. I knew that was not allowed, though I didn’t know why. It was hard to tell which thoughts I should have when I was older, and which thoughts people wanted me to start having now. 

The church looked out onto the McKenzie River, which dripped with moss, lichen, and skinny trees. Scott steered me toward the other baptizees, who’d already started lining up to go outside to the river. I wondered whether the McKenzie River had any fish in it.

~

Last year, in fourth grade, I dressed like a minnow for Halloween. Mom stitched each sequin onto my old corduroy skirt for scales. She wielded a sewing needle even at the dinner table and as she drank her morning coffee. The thread shushed through the fabric with each pull of her arm. Sometimes, as she drove me home from school, I plucked a shiny spot from the shoulder of her coat and rolled the sequin between my fingers. Wherever she went in the house, the floor sparkled behind her.

The morning of Halloween had been unnaturally warm and bright, and the windows glowed gold like they usually only did in August. I went down to breakfast and found my shimmering skirt beside my cereal bowl, covered all over in tiny scales. It itched my thighs when I put it on. I turned circles in front of our floor-length mirror. It flicked and flared like a fishtail. Surely Pastor Timothy would approve, with Jesus being a fisher of men and all. I always wondered what that meant for the women. We weren’t the fish or the fishers. Were we the nets? When the playground got cold at Christmastime, I imagined I was a fishing net, full of holes, catching nothing but the wind. 

I’d gone to school in the costume but snuck an old bedsheet into my backpack. It was a good call. In math class, the girl next to me couldn’t stop staring at my scales. Then she scratched a fingernail along a row of them, turning them from their silver sides to their blue ones. A few shed onto my black plastic chair. The kid on my other side, bored of long division, tugged a sequin from me with a snap. My mom’s stitches frayed, bristling white like dog hair through the fabric. “Fishface,” someone snickered. I spent the rest of the day as a ghost. 

The thing about salmon—I learned this on our field trip to the hatchery, and nobody ever mentions this, even though we all learned it together—is that they’re like little kids. They’re only allowed in certain places at certain times. They’re anadromous, a word I’m proud to remember even though, again, no one else cares. Baby fish are born in saltless water and then lose their scales, which flake off all over the place, as they grow up. Then they find their way to the salty ocean, where their bodies learn to fit in. When it’s time to return to where they were born and hatch their own eggs, they change again, and they’re uglier and redder. They swim upstream to get there. The fish’s new body is like a key that unlocks a new section of water.

A salmon that returns is not the same salmon that left. They’re different animals. That’s why a salmon falls apart after it lays its eggs. When I picture myself becoming an adult, I imagine my skin bursting away from me in all directions, like dandelion seeds. Blood everywhere. Pastor Timothy wouldn’t like to know I thought that way. Neither would Scott.

~

Down at the river I held the skirt of my white dress in my fists and tried to imagine what it would feel like when it got wet. It wasn’t homemade like my Halloween skirt. Mom bought it at the department store because of its thick, soft fabric. It could only get heavier when soaked through, which I didn’t like, because I was supposed to get lighter when I got sinless.

I lined up with the others alongside the outdoor pulpit, which had been covered in all sorts of flowers. It smelled like a wedding. Mom carried a beach towel down to the shore. It trailed in the mud, but she didn’t seem to notice.

I looked at the others in the line and pictured each of them as a dirty classroom blackboard, soon to be wiped down with a rag and some rubbing alcohol. I felt so ready to be erased. Mom and Scott found their seats among the folding chairs, and Pastor Timothy waited patiently at the pulpit. When we’d all gathered, he plunged into a scripture. I’d heard these words so many times before that I hardly registered them now. My ears clogged, like I was up in an airplane or down in the depths of the sea.

When he stopped speaking, Pastor Timothy stepped from the shore and into the river. He motioned to the first person in line. This woman picked her careful, barefoot way among the rocks until her shins shone red in the cold current. Timothy dunked her thoroughly, efficiently. I heard a sputter as she came up for air, rising from the green water, spraying white drops. The line began to shuffle forward. Each person splashed into the water and then out of it. They climbed, dripping, onto the bank, making mud where their wet feet hit the dirt. I tried to think all the sinful thoughts I could before it was too late. I won’t share what the thoughts were here. They didn’t matter. I wouldn’t matter until I was out of that river and making mud, too. 

Then Pastor Timothy’s hand appeared in front of me. I took it and eased my toes into the water. It wasn’t as cold as I’d expected, but it was full of swirling silt and water bugs. Timothy’s hand rested at the base of my neck and he leaned me backward into the river.

I scurried to plug my nose, but it was too late. The taste of silt filled my mouth. I entered a layer further down in the current, colder, strong and tugging. It pulled my skin and began to mold me, like I was clay in the hands of the McKenzie River. My feet fused together and shrank. My forehead ballooned to a hump. My teeth extended into sharp points. My scales somersaulted beneath a firm hand, from one side to the other, one color to the next. Adronomous, I thought. I submerged myself further. I couldn’t breathe until I could. The water was slick and so was I. It moved through me. 

I corkscrewed myself and stretched, finally, in a way that I never could before, a complete barrel-roll that spun on and on. I was big and red and ugly. I became slippery enough to wriggle out of the hands that held me. With a flick of my tail, I dove deep into the freshwater current, pulling air and water, air and water, into my gills.