Married to a Cult Leader

At the end of the hallway, Annabeth leads me into a massive sun porch looking out onto a sprawling and overgrown yard where two Mexican women are stooped in the afternoon sun, pulling weeds from the dirt with straw hats pulled low over their brows. Behind them, at the edge of the patch of newly cleared earth, stand four large hives, their outlines hazy with the energetic activity of bees.

Compared to the outside, the interior of the room is an Eden teeming with life. Ornate iron stands holding ceramic pots overflow with flowering plants. Lush ferns spill from hanging planters in the ceiling, casting pale flickering shadows across the brick floor. Annabeth gestures for me to sit at a small enamel-top table against one of the glass walls, and I sit down in the chair facing the doorway. She settles gracefully into the seat across from me, smiling as she glances out at the women working outside, then turns to me.

“Well, Andrea, I want to thank you for joining me this afternoon,” she says, her voice smooth and slow. The kind of voice you expect to hear introducing an old jazz record, not coming from a middle-aged blond woman. “Is it alright if I call you Andrea?” 

“Andy is fine,” I say. "Not even my mom called me Andrea."

“Andy, then.” She raises a manicured hand from her lap and flicks it almost imperceptibly in the air. As if from nowhere, a young Mexican woman, no older than nineteen, materializes and places two saucers down on the table. Two gleaming silver spoons, catching the light. Two matching teacups. She disappears and comes back with a jar of honey, a teapot, and a bowl of fresh lemon slices. She pours the tea, first for Annabeth and then for myself, then places the teapot down onto the table. 

“Thank you, Marguerita,” Annabeth says by way of dismissal, and the young woman bows her head gently and retreats from the room. As I look up, I see her peering with one eye from behind the door frame. 

Sensing that she does not have my full attention, Annabeth glances over her shoulder towards the doorway, but Marguerita has already vanished. She turns back to me and pulls the wooden honey dipper from the jar and swirls a thin drizzle over her tea. “From the hives,” she says lightly. “Help yourself.”

I squeeze a slice of lemon into my own cup and thank her.

"I was very sorry to hear about her passing, Andy. Even if it had been so long. I always remembered her fondly."

I laugh despite myself. "I can't say that a lot of people have said they remember her fondly, but thank you."

“Well, I suppose I had a very different glimpse of her than others, being so young. But even so, that's why I wanted to have you when I heard you had been back in town. Your family meant a great deal to me when I was young. And besides," she says, "I've hardly had any real company since we got here, you know. Still putting the house back in order. So this is a real treat.”

“Everything looks pretty well put together to me,” I say amiably, gesturing around the room and the various plants. “I mean these are absolutely gorgeous. Really.”

“Oh, these are all from the New Hampshire house,” she says. “We had them moved. I couldn’t bear to part with them. You know with Joshua so busy, well. I guess I busied myself with the plants.” She laughs. “They really are though. Gorgeous, I mean. It was a shame to leave the garden. Really, that broke my heart more than anything. Like saying goodbye to a child in a way.” 

I nod knowingly, as if I have any experience with plants or with children, and she blows delicately on the surface of her tea.

“But,” she says brightly, “moving the church was the decision we made. The right decision. And we’re already breaking ground on a new garden here, so. A blessing, in itself.”

We look out the window at the women in the yard, their backs bathed in golden light as they prostrate themselves over the earth, baskets filled with weeds.

“How many people have you hired for the house so far?” I ask.

“So far? Oh, about fifteen or twenty or so. That’s for the whole property though. And then we’ll go from there as more needs arise.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, this house has been basically empty since my mother died. That’s twenty-five-odd years of total neglect. I mean, just to make it habitable….” She exhales deeply and shakes her head. 

“Well, like I said, from what I can see, it looks beautiful.”

“You’re very sweet,” she says. “Believe me, if I could wave a magic wand and just fix everything all at once, well. But God doesn’t work like that.”

“I guess not, no.”

She tilts her head and smiles. “No. But he’s blessed us with a lot of truly beautiful people who are helping us remake our home, so we manage. We’re very grateful.”

“Do all these people belong to your church?” I ask.

Annabeth’s smile flattens into a thin line, as though a winch behind her jaw has tightened. “Our teachings tell us that everyone on earth, whether it’s here, or New Hampshire, or the Mekong River Delta, everyone, everywhere, belongs to our church.” Her tone is level but all the softness in her voice has dissolved. “There are simply those who believe, and those who don’t.”

“And the people who work here, do they?”

“Do they what?”

“Believe.”

She doesn’t answer, and instead closes her eyes and brings her cup to rest softly on her chin, below her lower lip. She takes a long deep breath through her nose, as if savoring the steam. “You know my mother was a firm believer in afternoon tea,” she says after a while. “She insisted on it. Said that more than anything else, a cup of hot tea is what anchors the day.”

“You must miss her,” I say slowly, and I get the feeling that I have somehow lost control of a conversation I didn't realize I was trying to manage.

She looks out the window. “My mother had a lot of convictions. A lot of them were trite, like the tea, but some of them were actually quite profound. I always admired that about her, I think. Envied that about her, in hindsight. You know, she had her principles and I had her money. That was it. I mean, sure I had an education, but really, what I had was the money. And that was the important thing to me.” She laughs joylessly. 

“I floated through my whole life this insipid, vacuous brat. For years and years and years. So much so that I think I barely even noticed that she died. I let her home fall into disrepair. I left New York for the last time, or what I thought was the last time. And then I met Joshua.”

She places her cup down and turns to me, her blue eyes boring into me with such intensity that for a moment she looks like an entirely different person. “Suddenly there was this person who was so full of passion, and love, and this fire, this unbelievable fire, and I thought….” She trails off and looks back outside. I imagine her as she might have been as a child, a sulking blond in braids, wandering the lawn pulling petals from flowers. My aunt trailing behind her, throwing the petals into the wind.

“When I met Joshua, for the first time in my life, I thought—I knew—I had purpose. And I knew what that purpose was. It was like breathing for the first time.

“We got married four months after we met. I was 27. We moved to Vermont to start his first congregation, built a house, and I started to drink tea again. Every afternoon.” She chuckles softly and shrugs. “Turns out my mother was right.”

For a moment we sit in silence. My tea scalds the roof of my mouth. From behind the door frame, another glimpse of a curious dark eye.

“I thought you moved from New Hampshire,” I said finally.

“We did.”

“You just said Joshua’s first congregation was in Vermont.”

“Oh, it was.”

“What made you leave?”

She takes a deep breath and leans slowly back in her chair, hands folded in her lap. “Like I said. There are those who believe, and those who don’t. Just like here. And sometimes when things go wrong and people are looking for an explanation, those who don’t, like to demonize us. Because we’re different. Or because they don’t understand. Just like here.” 

“I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“I don’t take it personally.”

“Well.” I take a sip of my tea.

“I’m married to a cult leader; you get used to it.”

I cough in surprise and choke. She waits calmly for my sputtering to stop. I take a shuddering breath to steady myself. “So you are saying it’s a cult then?”

“I’m not,” she says. “But you are. And everybody else certainly is.”

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “Listen, Annabeth—”

“It’s alright," she says. "You know that’s the funny thing about faith. You have to have it even when it’s inconvenient.”

I cough again, eyes watering. She blinks at me.

“Let me ask you a question. Do you believe in God? Not my God, because you and I both know that the answer to that is no, but any God?”

I raise my eyebrows. “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I don’t really think about it."

"You know what's funny?" she says. "I used to say the same thing."