Let’s Dress Up

My mother was teaching Sunday school at this Pentecostal church for a while.
I don’t recall exactly how young I was—
and it wasn’t even on Sundays.
It was in the evenings. Wednesdays, I think. But again—I can’t be sure.

She was teaching the younger kids—toddlers and whatnot.
I wasn’t paying attention.
I just wanted to play my Game Boy.
But that was rarely an option,
since it was perpetually hidden from me as punishment.

She didn’t make me do any of the Sunday school things here, though.

“These people talk in tongues and worship snakes,”
she told me once.
“This isn’t our church. This is a paycheck.”

She would park me in an empty room of the church most of the time.
Occasionally, there was another kid my age I could play with.

He was the son of the priest, maybe?
Or the deacon?
Or whatever the head honcho of this particular cult flavor was called.

“Don’t tell him we don’t believe in this religion,”
my mother warned me.
“I lied to get this job. We need the money since your father is on a layoff.”

“Yeah, whatever. I want my Game Boy back when we get home.”

I really couldn’t have cared less about this shit.
I was already well on the road to non-believership.

It never made sense to me. Especially how disgruntled each different religious group got about other religious groups’ made-up magical people.

The room we played in had a bunch of random craft fare,
and we would draw, make things up, and have fun.
He was a good kid, I suppose.
I didn’t care.

On one of the evenings -
the last evening, I should say -
a basket of yarn caught my eye.

I pointed to it.

“Let’s make bikinis with the yarn,” I said.

“Huh?” was the other boy’s response.
Understandable, in hindsight.

“Yeah, let’s make bikinis!”
I don’t know why I was so excited about it, but I was.

“Don’t we have to, like… knit or crochet them?”

I had no fucking clue.

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know how to do either of those things,
but I have an idea.”

I started taking my clothes off.

“C’mon, get naked. We need to be naked, because bikinis don’t go over clothes.”

“Okay, I guess that makes sense,”
the other boy said, joining me in nakedness.

I handed him one of the yarn balls and took the loose end.

“Hold it so it unravels,” I said.

I twirled around, wrapping the yarn around my pelvis,
just below my belly flop.
I was a bit of a husky kid, as my mother liked to say.

We weaved it around me, between my legs.
It took a while,
but I had a bikini bottom made of yarn.

Then we repeated the process for him.

Eventually, an adult came into the playroom and freaked out.
We were told to cut the yarn off ourselves.
That we should be ashamed of what we had done.

My mother was fired.

I was glad I didn’t have to go back to that weird church again.