Instead, he offers
them his two virgin daughters.
Before the mob can accept or
reject, the two angels decide that was the last straw, and they smite the whole
crowd. The angels had been sent by God to discover whether there were at least
ten good men in the city of Sodom, but apparently not. The whole place must
burn.
Fine. The rest we know. But let’s
back up.
“Here are my two virgin daughters—take
them instead”?
What were the girls thinking when
they heard that? What did their mother say? What kind of a father chooses
strangers over his own children? Or is it the fact that they’re girls that
makes that all right?
I saw an Oprah once where
this guy confessed to having intercourse with his daughter from the time she
was three until she was five. His wife had left him and he was terribly
lonely, and he said it seemed like his daughter was the only person in this
world who loved him. He said he felt that having sex with her was just an
extension of that love. He said it with a straight face.
And all I could think was how much
that must have hurt the little girl to have a full-grown man’s penis inside
her. It must have ripped her apart.
The father went to prison for a
while, and now his daughter was grown and he wished she would see him, but he
knew she had to make the first move.
He sat there, evil and bug-eyed,
acting as if his daughter had wronged him somehow by cutting him out of her
life. He had taken from her the only purity she would ever have and he sat
there meek and abused, sad that his own life had gone so terribly wrong.
Oprah is a cool customer, but she
looked like she wanted to lunge from her seat and rip the guy’s tongue out.
She handled it well. She kept her voice moderate, she made eye contact, she
let him have his say, as sick as it was. But I imagined her afterward,
desperately ripping off her microphone and bolting from the stage and running
to her dressing room for a shower. She’s a lot stronger than I would be.
And then you think more about a
girl like that, helpless and small, her full-grown father looming over her and
maybe kissing her and saying sweet things, and inside she’s burning and
bleeding and she doesn’t understand why he has to hurt her like that. What
child should ever have to give up her trust like that? What did she do to
deserve such ruin?
And then your mind spins toward the
other injustices against children—AIDS babies, children born to famine,
children who die after a short life of nothing but misery.
That’s why I believe in
reincarnation. What kind of God would say, “Oops, time’s up, sorry it didn’t
work out, but that was your only chance”? It can’t be. Children who have been
hurt must be first in line for the next glorious life that comes along.
Children who have been raped or murdered or beaten must get to come back and
live those lives we see and envy—the people who have more than their fair share
of luck, it seems, but it isn’t more than their fair share at all. It’s
justice.
And Posie and I are all about
Justice.
[2]
“Look at this,” Posie said. “Angela’s
representing a girl this time. Actually, a woman now, but she was a girl at
the time.”
It was a Saturday afternoon in the
middle of June, and we were having lunch together before Posie’s shift.
Regular school was over, but I was
in summer school now—American Government, eight to noon every day. Torture.
But it was better than hanging around the house.
Jason was in summer school, too,
but at the community college. Even though he and Posie still had a year of
high school left, Jason decided to get a jump on his future engineering career
by taking some fun (for him) classes like Calculus and Physics for Math Freaks,
or whatever it was called.
Definitely a different species.
Posie was the only one of us
working. She waitressed at a place called Jimmy Rock’s where all the servers
got to sing. And every
Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair