[But I thought the old lady
dropped it into the ocean
at the end?]
Britney’s waiting. Tell me the line, Val. She wants the line. You’re hurting her.
[But I thought the old lady
dropped it into the ocean
at the end?]
Please. We take the target we’re assigned. You’re not supposed to ask questions.
[But I thought the old lady
dropped it into the ocean
at the end?]
Think. You know this oh, please, Val, refresh, Val.
[But I thought the old lady
dropped it into the ocean
at the end?]
Please, Val, refresh please, Val, we couldn’t have known, we couldn’t have—
[But I thought the old lady
dropped it into the ocean
at the end?]
Lock-In
William Boyle
Betsy hadn’t intended to be one of only five kids from her grade stupid enough to spend the night in a basement full of nuns, but that’s the way things have shaken out. No one told her this lock-in was optional. She’d been led to believe it was mandatory by both Sister Erin and Sister Margaret. So here she is.
The only other kids present are Loner Lily, twin goodie-goodies Sally and Mo, and Melissa Verdirame. No boys. Just the nice girls. The ones who bring the sisters apples and get gold star stickers. They’re all wearing their plaid school uniforms and heavy tights, which is weird. Betsy’s in her favorite red sweater with torn sleeves because she pulls them so far down over her palms and dungarees she got for her birthday from her cool cousin Elly. She’s in the wrong company.
The nuns have brewed a big pot of coffee. There are cookies from the dollar store. Board games, decks of cards, religion workbooks. Sister Mary Thomas is the most interesting person here. She’s pretty and young, and Betsy sometimes imagines her lying alone in bed, clutching a rosary and praying, and she wonders what kinds of things go through the mind of a pretty young nun when she’s alone in bed. She probably dreams about making muffins for Jesus. The other nuns are all old, with witch-whiskers and bony shoulders.
The school is St. Mary Mother of Jesus on the border of Bensonhurst and Gravesend in Brooklyn. It’s next door to the church, where they are now, in this musty basement that still smells of the perfumed neighborhood women who are always playing bingo and running raffles down here.
Betsy’s thirteen, in the eighth grade. She’s tired of how small her world is, tired of the same streets, the same blocks, the same garbage, the same leering eyes, tired of the dirty old men on the corners, tired of her teachers, of her dumbass mom and even dumberass stepdad, of trying to make friends with kids who will never be her friends.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. If Betsy was at her house, five short blocks away, she’d be sleeping. She likes to get up as early as possible, even on weekends, and watch whatever shows she taped the night before. Saturday Night Live just ended an hour ago and she programmed her VCR to record it. That’s what she’d be watching on Sunday morning over Frosted Flakes and her crossword puzzle.
She’s not even sure how long this thing will last. Will they let her go when it’s light or will they make them all go to Mass upstairs at eight before setting them loose? What’s the point?
Sundays are Betsy’s favorite day. Her mom works at the bakery, and her stepdad goes to Jersey to work concessions at Giants Stadium. Her mom has become so nasty since getting remarried, and her stepdad thinks she’s nothing if she’s not his blood. He wants her to forget about her old man, who split when she was seven. She’s so glad to have this one day a week where they’re out of her hair. Sundays mean her grandma makes spedini while her grandpa watches Abbott and Costello. Her grandparents aren’t dumbasses; she likes them just fine. Now she fears her Sunday will be shot because she’ll be so tired.
“What time do we get done here?” Betsy asks Loner Lily.
Loner Lily is eating a butter crunch cookie. She shrugs.
Monsignor Villani walks in. He’s wearing a bulky robe like someone’s father at a slumber party. He’s got pizza in a big Ziploc freezer bag. He throws it down on the folding table near the stage and says, “Some leftovers from Spumoni Gardens.”
Sister Mary Thomas comes over and sits next to Betsy. She’s wearing a plain white blouse and mom jeans and her brown hair is held up with bobby pins. She says, “You look bored.”
“I am bored,” says Betsy.
“And tired, I bet.”
“I’m so bored I’m not even that tired.”
Sister Mary Thomas smiles. “I’m bored, too.”
“You are?” Betsy says, feeling scandalized. She doesn’t think of nuns as having the capacity to be bored. She assumes they just fill that time up with loving God or whatever.
“I need a drink.”
“You what?”
“A beer. I’d really kill for a beer.”
“You drink beer?”
“Sure.”
“What else do you do?”
“I watch movies.”
“Really?”
“We have a VCR in the rectory. I love Top Gun. Have you seen it?”
“Of course I’ve seen Top Gun.”
“You know what else I like?”
“What?”
“Witness.”
“That one’s R.”
“Have you seen it?”
Betsy turns and looks hard at Sister Mary Thomas. “Is this a setup?”
Sister Mary Thomas laughs. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you making me think you’re one thing to try to get me to open up about myself and my problems at home?”
“You have problems at home?” Sister Mary Thomas asks.
“Forget it.”
“This is the real me, Betsy. I’m not setting you up.” Sister Mary Thomas plucks a few bobby pins from behind her ears and lets her hair down.
“Did you just let your hair down?” Betsy asks. “Like, literally?”
Sister Mary Thomas laughs again. It’s a soothing laugh, not horsey at all like the other nun laughs she’s heard. “You want to see something?”
“What?”
“Come with me.”
Sister Mary Thomas gets up and walks toward the stage at the far end of the basement. The other nuns are all caught up playing rummy. Sally is brushing Mo’s hair, while Melissa digs around in the beading kit she brought along. Loner Lily is biting her nails and spitting the pieces onto the checkerboard floor. No one’s paying any attention to them.
They go up on the stage. Sister Mary Thomas holds the heavy red curtain open for Betsy and leads her into darkness.
“Where are we going?” Betsy asks.
“There’s a door back here somewhere,” Sister Mary Thomas replies.
Behind the curtain smells like the lobby of the Loew’s Oriental theater where Betsy goes to see her movies, sad and sticky and forgotten. Betsy scans the darkness and makes out a stack of folding tables.
Sister Mary Thomas feels along the wall and finds a door, turning the knob and pushing it in, snapping on a light. A small storage room is illuminated. Piles of boxes. A metal shelving rack full of paper plates, Styrofoam cups, and a big electric coffee percolator the bingo ladies must use.
Nestled in the corner of the room is a statue of the Virgin Mary, wrapped in a green cord of Christmas lights. Sister Mary Thomas goes over, finds the plug, and the statue comes alive with dots of red and white light, her blue robe thorny with shadows, her cracked plaster face spotlighted. “I call her Disco Madonna,” Sister Mary Thomas says.
“You do?” Betsy says.
Sister Mary Thomas finds that response funny and laughs yet again and then she starts singing “Lady Madonna” by the Beatles but she changes it to “Disco Madonna.”
Betsy studies the face of the statue. Nose chipped off, thin black cracks like veins, a smudge of something green on one cheek. “Why’s she in h
ere?”
“Who knows? I’m glad she is, though.” Sister Mary Thomas finds a couple of step stools leaning against the base of the rack. She opens them and sets them up in front of the statue. “Sit.”
Betsy does, putting her elbows up on her knees, pushing her hair behind her ears.
“You’re gonna like this,” Sister Mary Thomas says.
“Like what?”
Sister Mary Thomas kneels close to the statue and feels around behind it, coming out with a Sony Walkman and lightweight headphones with orange cushions and a duct-taped headband. She puts the headphones on Betsy, opens the Walkman, flipping the tape that’s in there, and finally pressing play.
Madonna’s “Holiday” comes on. Betsy recognizes the intro immediately. She has a Walkman at home and a shoebox full of cassettes. Her mom hardly ever buys her tapes at Sam Goody when she asks for them, but she has a bunch of blanks and spends a lot of time dubbing songs off the radio. Lots of them, she misses the very beginning or the dee-jay’s talking ruins it. Betsy smiles and says, “You like Madonna?”
Sister Mary Thomas puts a finger over her lips and shushes her.
Betsy strains her neck and puts her hand up in apology, not realizing she was speaking so loudly, the music blasting in her ears. She listens to the song until the end.
Sister Mary Thomas stops the tape. “You know what she’s talking about in that song?”
Betsy pushes the headphones down around her neck. “Like... wanting to take a holiday?”
“Sure. Exactly. We all deserve a break. All of us. Things don’t have to be so hard.”
“Is this your break? This little room and statue and the music?”
“This is an important place to me. I wanted to share it with you.”
“Why me?”
“You’re not like the other kids. God can forgive me for saying that. I see something else in you.” She pauses. “I want you to come here sometimes. I’m leaving for good in a few days.”
“Where are you going?”
“Can you keep a secret?”
Betsy has never—not once in her life, that she remembers—been asked to keep a secret. She doesn’t have friends like that. She hopes one day she will. Not in high school; she’s anticipating that’ll suck. Maybe in college. She nods now, promising to keep her mouth shut, miming zipping her lips and throwing away the key.
“I’m in love,” Sister Mary Thomas says.
“But you’re a nun.”
“Nuns can fall in love.”
“I thought just with Jesus.”
“Well, I do love Jesus, but I also fell in love with a man I’ve known for a couple of years. He’s my best friend.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“I don’t know. I sensed you’re the kind of person I could tell. You feel trapped, I can see it in your eyes. Not just here at this lock-in, but at school and church and with your family. And that’s how I feel, too. And being with this man makes me feel different.”
“Who is he?”
“Father Dave.”
“Father Dave? Are you kidding? He’s so little. He’s like five-one. He must be six inches shorter than you.”
Sister Mary Thomas laughs again. “What’s height? Plus, I like that he’s short.”
Betsy shakes her head. “Where are you going?”
“He bought a car in secret. We’re just going to run away together. He wants to go to Florida. Maybe Miami.”
“Does he need to sit on a telephone book when he drives?”
Sister Mary Thomas swats at her leg like they’re girlfriends. “You’re terrible.” A moment passes. Tears rim her eyes. “He’s very good to me. He’s very nice. I’ve never had much of a life. I joined the convent at eighteen. I went to an all-girls Catholic boarding school on Long Island before that. I was faithful and disciplined and I never broke any rules. I think you have to break rules now and again to truly live. I don’t think that means you don’t love God. That’s what that song’s about in a way, right?”
Betsy nods because what else can she do. She’s struck by how surreal the moment is: sitting with pretty young Sister Mary Thomas in front of Disco Madonna, The Immaculate Collection tape in a secret Walkman, a secret love being whispered about.
Father Dave! Betsy once saw him eating spaghetti out of a Styrofoam cup on the front stoop of the school with a plastic fork. She asked why he didn’t just use a bowl and he said, “This is my special cup.” When he says Mass, all the old ladies complain because he talks low and gives these scholarly homilies. She remembers him talking about this one book, The Woman Who Was Poor, and she went to the library the next day to see if they had it and they didn’t because it was old and French. She wonders if Sister Mary Thomas and Father Dave have kissed, or if they’re saving that for when they run away. She pictures them on a beach, her in her habit, him in his clerical clothes, rolling around.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Sister Mary Thomas asks.
Betsy shakes her head. There is not one single boy in her class that she likes, that she has a crush on. There are no girls either. When she gets a crush, it’s on an actor or actress in some movie she’s seen, and she lives with it for a few days and dreams of a life where it’s her and him, or her and her. Christian Slater and Winona Ryder and River Phoenix are probably the biggest crushes she’s had.
“What kind of problems do you have at home? Is it your stepdad?”
Betsy doesn’t answer.
“If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”
“But you won’t be for long.”
Sister Mary Thomas puts the Walkman in Betsy’s lap and stands up. “I’m going back out before Sister Erin comes looking for me,” she says. “You stay. Listen to the tape. ‘Lucky Star’ is next. I love that one.”
“Thanks, Sister,” Betsy says.
“Thank you for keeping my secret.”
And then, just like that, Sister Mary Thomas is gone from the room and Betsy is left wondering if the last however long has even been real, but she knows it has been because here she is with the Walkman and Disco Madonna, and the stool where Sister Mary Thomas was sitting is still warm from her bottom.
Betsy can’t imagine what Sister Mary Thomas just told her, how she opened up. Isn’t she afraid, even in the slightest, of what Betsy might do with that information? Girls gossip. Betsy doesn’t, but Sister Mary Thomas can’t know that for sure.
Betsy presses play and listens to “Lucky Star” and “Borderline.”
She moves her head so Disco Madonna is sort of swaying in front of her. She wishes she had a watermelon lollipop. She starts thinking of the world outside the lock-in, how dark the streets must be, how there probably aren’t any people walking around, how quiet it must be with the trains coming less frequently. Her neighborhood is dead. She imagines that the city, across the bridge, is still alive and lit up. She knows it is. There are shows, bars, crowds of people, all-night movies.
She’s been to Manhattan only for the Christmas tree and a couple of museums. She wishes she was there. She wishes she was sitting in a movie theater with a bucket of popcorn.
A lock-in isn’t anything. No one can keep you locked in, she decides. Sister Mary Thomas is proof of that.
She stops the tape and leaves the storage room.
She has twenty bucks in her pocket from her grandma. She thinks that’ll be enough to get away, even if just for a little while. Train fare and a movie and popcorn and a soda. Maybe a couple of lollipops.
She searches around the dark stage for a way out. There’s another door. This one opens on a staircase that smells like incense. She follows the smell, stumbling up the stairs in the dark, and comes out in a narrow hallway across from the sacristy. She’s afraid that Monsignor Villani will jump out at her.
There’s a dull glow coming from beyond the pews in the church, an electric candle that’s still on. She’s never thought of those candles as things that get shut off. People kneel there before or after Mass and put money in th
e offertory box and push a silver button to light a candle and they say their prayer. She always figured once a prayer was made, the light just stayed on, even in the dark of night. But now she sees how that’s stupid. Of course the candles get reset daily. All those lost prayers.
She hopes now the doors aren’t locked and that she can get out.
At the end of the hallway, there’s a heavy door that leads to the back parking lot on Eighty-Fourth Street. She tries the handle and it’s locked, but there’s a latch below that and she turns it and tries again and cold air whooshes in from outside and suddenly she feels as free as she’s ever felt.
She runs out into the lot, letting the door pound shut behind her, and cuts a quick right onto Eighty-Fourth Street. The streetlamps and telephone poles looks sadder in the middle of the night. A hush she’s never heard hums through the neighborhood. The sound of darkness and sleep. It’s colder than she remembered it being when she entered the lock-in and yet she feels fine in her sweater.
Her breath is in front of her.
She slows down at the corner, turns left onto Twenty-Third Avenue, passing the bank where she remembers going with her father to their safe deposit box before he moved away to California, and then she makes a right on Eighty-Sixth Street, staring up at the quiet El and all the closed shops with their graffiti-covered riot gates pulled down.
It’s a pretty short walk to the Bay Parkway station, where she’ll catch the B train into the city. She’s not sure how often they come at night. She pictures herself sitting on the platform, her legs crossed, looking out over the neighborhood, listening to the hush, waiting.
She expects to see men lurch out from shadowy market stalls. Cars pass in the street, going fast. One slows a bit, the driver seeming to consider her, but she doesn’t look over.
Just as she starts to climb the stairs up to the El platform, she hears a voice from behind her. It’s Sister Mary Thomas, halfway down the block, jogging, calling out her name.
The Outcast Hours Page 38
