T-Girl Confessions: The Girl Next Door

You know those girls you used to see in, like, early 90s sitcoms, the perfect little prayer group promise ring princesses? Daddy's little girl saving herself for Jesus? Me neither. Until the Sawyers moved in next door I had never met anyone who even pretended to fit that description.

Growing up everyone in my neighborhood was pretty secular, with the exception of maybe one or two Italian families who went to Mass every Sunday out of routine and obligation, two words that turned me off almost as much as rules and responsibility.

My parents were always working, so weekends were their time to crash out and hang around the house in their sweatpants. We almost never saw the inside of a church unless some distant relative was getting married or burying an even more distant relative.

It wasn't that my parents didn't believe in God, it was just one of those things where they felt like they ate shit enough all week, so they didn't feel like kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing for some kiddie diddler who wasn't even paying them.

Every year our old next door neighbors—Chuck and Barbara Weebley, Chuck a dentist, wife Barbara an aerobics instructor—would host a block party that was really just an excuse to get everyone in their backyard for barbecue and cocktails. Everyone partied and played volleyball in their pool and got liquored up enough not to notice the way Chuck Weebley looked at their wives and daughters.

The guys talked about guy shit—the Friday night game, the tail on the new checkout girl at the local ice cream shoppe, the expensive sound systems they wanted to get to complete their man caves, the cost of maintaining a pool. And the ladies all talked about lady shit—the blowjobs they dreaded giving their husbands for their birthdays, the ridiculous toys their husbands wanted to waste money on, the abs on that kid who hoses down the boats at the dock, the shitty way they were treated at the nail salon.

That all changed when the Weebleys decided to move to Florida. Their house was put up for sale and the Sawyers moved in and, within weeks, the pool was filled in with cement and Chuck Weebley's Go Giants! flag was replaced in the front yard by a giant American flag and the Psalm 118:24 flag, which told everyone who passed that they better be damn glad for the day, and everyone on the block was invited to a Sunday supper—not a block party and damn sure not a bikini boozefest—in their new abode.

Some people pretended they didn't get the invite, but most showed up and were shocked and disappointed by what they found. The Sawyers—Douglas the youth director at a Christian camp and Susanna the social worker—were total Jesus freaks with absolutely no sense of humor and lots of rules about what constituted polite dinner conversation. Man caves and local gossip were verboten and Douglas was more interested in telling everyone they were going to hell than in who would win the Super Bowl.

That was the first and only time anyone attended Sunday supper at the Sawyers, not for lack of invitations. Everyone thought they were just too weird, especially the way they wouldn't let their son, Martin, sit at the dinner table or talk to the neighbors. As a matter of fact, no one could tell you what Martin looked like because they'd only glimpsed him once when he shuffled into the kitchen off the dining room with a hoodie covering his head. Susanna excused herself from the table and went into the kitchen and whispered harshly at the teenage boy before handing him a plate and summarily excusing him to his bedroom on the second floor of the house.

“Our son is forbidden to eat with us until such time that he learns to appreciate what God has given him,” Douglas offered in the way of an explanation.

Nobody asked what he meant, but everyone speculated afterward. There were rumors that Martin was gay, that he was a teenage drug addict, that maybe he dared to eat more than one bread roll at dinner without saying Grace. This last one was by far the most repeated.

I remember my father and one of his buddies making fun of the Sawyers.

“Maybe that's not their son at all,” the old man proposed half-seriously. “He's probably Doug's rent boy. You know these pastor types are all a bunch of fags.”

“Maybe he's Doug's stunt cock when it's time to fill Susanna with his seed,” his buddy joked.

More alarmingly, no one knew how old Martin actually was. Of th