The Whacking Game

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Whacking Game” by Amy McLay Paterson. Amy is a writer, mother, librarian, and union negotiator, originally from New Brunswick, Canada. She likes to shoot her longbow, bake cakes for her loved ones (and occasionally for her enemies), climb walls badly, and experiment with art. She is currently engaged in several writing projects, including a YA novel for her daughter.

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We could have found Jesus in any corner of our homes—in discarded church bulletins, slowly decomposing underneath the kitchen telephone; in intricate Bible verse cross-stitch, dictating all the acceptable forms of love; in discarded pocket New Testaments, bright red with fading gold trim, that seemed to multiply whenever you left one in a drawer or under a wobbly chair leg and forgot to keep an eye on it. And still we trundled up the stairs to the church rec room every Wednesday night to lounge in busted-up bean bag chairs and snack on store-brand cookies. The Lord was with us always, but only at Youth Group have I ever played the Whacking Game.

The best part of the Whacking Game—the only part that mattered—was the whacking. What else but the promise of violence could draw us—disaffected and liminal youth—out of basement stupors, where we stared for hours at rec room televisions, flicking through channels, flirting with nihilism? The whacking stick: in a bigger city, a newspaper might have done the job, but the advantage of St. Stephen was that we could coil the telephone book up tight, held in place with the spare hair elastic I carried religiously on my wrist.

To play the whacking game: One of us would stand in the middle of the circle, brandishing the whacking stick, waiting for the rest of us to call out a name. Once a name was spoken, the whacker would have only seconds to find and pummel the target before a new name, a new victim, was offered. We whacked on the upper thighs; the boys wailing on each other, because if they smacked you hard enough it could mean lot of things but mainly that they didn't want to date you. Us girls, it was understood, should not pull our punches. We could whack anyone, but preferably the boys, because ours was a different test: If we struck with all our might and it still didn't hurt, that meant we failed at whacking but passed a more important trial that only some of us knew was happening. We played the whacking game so much that our intrepid Youth Pastor found a magazine that was just the right size, reinforced it with packing tape, and started bringing it to all our meetings, just in case. I don’t remember who won or how; winning wasn’t the point.

When the game was over and our confused cocktails of boiling blood had settled, it was time to bring out the Bibles and pretend that’s what we came for all along. We read Ephesians 5 aloud, with the tacit agreement that wives submit yourselves to your own husbands was a serious proposition, worthy at least of our attention and debate. And I was never so spent that I couldn’t argue no, but all the same, I stayed in my beanbag sipping my Kool-Aid, because the beast inside me is finite, and after all, the price of whacking is to be whacked back. So, we, girls who could not all be pastor’s wives, engaged in this key question of whether and how to help-mate these goofy boys who pummeled us with rolled-up magazines as a pit-stop on their paths to righteousness. I set my indignation on the pyre with the rest of the opinions, and at the end of the night, we offered them up in prayer.

***

On Sunday mornings, we dressed in crisp white blouses tucked into freshly ironed skirts and sat with our parents on rusty folding chairs in the old community center that served as our church hall. One Sunday, the pastor’s daughter performed a song she wrote, about falling leaves singing hallelujah. The lyrics were catchy, her voice was clear. And as she strummed, in my head I could see those leaves hit the ground—whack, whack, whack—dead to a one, with no more fury left inside them. And we all rejoiced together and wished to be falling leaves.

***

If the whacking game was our daily bread, the Sock Game was our baptism by fire. It was saved for special occasions, like the co-ed church sleepovers where the boys slept downstairs in the church hall until they inevitably snuck upstairs to the rec room to kidnap whoever of the girls was most popular or desired—or whoever screamed the most delightedly, which was usually the same thing anyway. To play the sock game, we first abandoned our shoes into a mountain by the door and scattered ourselves around the room, waiting to hear go. The goal of the Sock Game was simple: to be the last person in the room wearing a sock. There were no other rules.

We played at dusk with the lights off in a room with large windows, hazy with new darkness. From a lonely corner, I watched Lizzy shriek as two boys pinned her down while a third peeled off her socks.

But it must be a good shriek, I told myself, or else they would have stopped.

So, at the next Youth Retreat, when we played British Bulldog, I tackled Lizzy to the ground in the good and proper way, where you dive just above the knee and roll as you hit the ground, so you feel it all, but it doesn't hurt, not really. It had been raining earlier that morning, and we were all soaked through, but the mud made the ground soft, and I knew she was game. I'd seen it before.

But she sprang up spluttering, "Amy, what the fuck?" and I said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And it was true, but it wasn’t the tackle I was sorry for: I had failed another test somehow.

***

Sometimes, on special occasions, we were invited to worship at a real church building, with cathedral ceilings and wooden pews and all the accompanying pomp and ceremony. Fading green devotionals peeked out of the back pockets of each pew, and we could track the sermon’s progress by following along with the hymn board at the front of the nave. A guest pastor paced in front of the pulpit, anxious to prove his mettle. He called for the youth to the front of the room, and we came tentatively, like falling leaves—unable to fight the larger gravity. On demand, we stood straight and tall and closed our eyes; he continued to orate, and my mind wandered—when could we sit down? How long until the next hymn? Could I get away with scratching my nose just inside the rim?

And then he was walking down the line of us, tapping on our foreheads. One by one we fell to the ground—whack, whack, whack—and I stood anxiously shifting my feet at the far end of the line, wishing that whatever was going to happen would just be over with already. And then he pushed on my forehead.

Here is what I know: It is so much easier just to fall. When I am caught unawares, already off-balance through impatience; when there’s someone standing behind to lower me to the ground, which happens to be soft and carpeted and much more comfortable than the pew. I let myself lie still on the carpet, relishing corpse pose for a moment before opening my eyes. My friends lay scattered around me on the floor, a war zone parody. The pastor, bulwarked by the success of his magic trick, had moved on from us and continued to dazzle the rest of his audience. Of the bodies on the floor, only one boy appeared conscious; when our eyes met, we both quickly turned away. Several of my friends were in spasms, their lips murmuring sounds that I couldn’t make out.

Here is what I felt: Shame. For falling. For not falling hard enough. For not standing firmer. For not pushing back. For feeling trapped. For wanting to fall. For not wanting it enough. For wanting not to fall. For not wanting that enough either. For the time when I was eight when my dad called me up in front of the whole church to demonstrate a trust fall and I just kept shaking my head no. For losing my faith in a folding chair listening to a teenager sing about leaves. For never aspiring towards faith. For never knowing when to fight and when to fall. For knowing I want both, all the time, all at once.

Here is what I don’t know: if god exists and wants to play in our games.

Here is what I wondered: which part of the test I had failed; what the others saw that I didn’t.

***

The night I won the Sock Game, I slunk around the margins of the room, waiting for the competition to whittle itself down. Avoiding the fray, I watched as one by one my cohort limped barefoot from the battlefield. Soon enough, it was down to just two of us. One of the smaller boys had prevailed against his comrades. We circled each other, hesitantly, each with one sock remaining. He grabbed my sock and pulled; I pulled back, and undecided, it tore—half his, half mine. He paused, momentarily stunned, with my half-sock in his hand.

I saw my moment and dove.