by Mary Robison
Melissa leaned toward him and said, “Blah, blah, blah.” She pushed her plate to one side. “I just have to hit Lily?” she asked Mulby.
“That would be plenty for me,” he said.
Ray said, “Eat something, Melissa. Act your age.”
“Don’t mind me,” she said, leaning over the table. She batted the priest’s eating hand. “Is that good enough?”
“I’m afraid not,” Mulby said.
Father Phaeton, a man with red hair and bad skin, asked Melissa to pass the Parmesan cheese.
“Ignore her, if you can, Father Mulby,” Ray said. “I’m sure it’s her blood week.”
“And the saltcellar, too,” Father Phaeton added.
Mulby jerked forward. His large hand closed down on Melissa’s wrist. “It’s not that,” he said to Ray. “I can tell that about a woman by holding her hand, and it’s not that.”
PENNY WAS LYING ON THE sofa at home. She had a folded washcloth across her forehead. Her eyes were pressed shut against the pain in her head, and tears ran over her cheekbones.
“It’s not necessarily a migraine,” Ray told her. He had drawn a wing chair up beside the sofa. “My head’s pounding, too. Could’ve been the food.”
“I don’t think church food could hurt anybody, Ray,” said Penny.
The nieces were sitting cross-legged on the rug. “Why not?” Sister Mary Clare said. “It’s not blessed or anything. Myself, I’ve been woozy ever since we ate.”
“I just meant they’re so clean at St. Anne’s,” Penny said. “And none of you are sick like I am. Don’t try to convince yourselves you are.”
“I’m not sick,” Melissa said.
“You didn’t eat a mouthful,” Sister Mary Clare said. She exhaled and stood up.
“I wonder why you visit us every year, Melissa,” Penny said.
“Do you mind it?” Melissa asked. “If you do—”
“She doesn’t,” Ray said.
“No,” Penny said, “I don’t mind. I just wonder if you girls could find something to do outside for a bit.”
“Lily can push me in the swing,” Melissa said. “Okay, Lily?”
Penny said, “You should have talked to Father Phaeton, Melissa. They say he’s dissatisfied with the life.”
“That would have been the thing,” Ray said. He told the nieces, “Maybe I’ll go out back with you, so Penny can get better.”
Penny took his hand and squeezed it.
“Maybe I won’t,” he said. He turned the washcloth on his wife’s brow.
Sister Mary Clare stood in the moonlight by a tomato stake. She was fingering her rosary beads.
“Don’t be doing that,” Melissa said. She moved down to the end of the lawn, where it was bordered by a shallow stream. She bent over the water. In the moonlight, she saw a school of minnows swerve over a fold in the mud next to an old bike tire.
Sister Mary Clare followed Melissa and said, behind her, “I won’t be seeing you again. I’m going into cloister.”
Melissa leaned against a tall tree. She dug her thumbnail into a bead of sweet gum on the bark.
“And I’m taking a vow of silence,” the nun said. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”
“I think it’s a good idea, and probably what you want. I’m glad.”
“If you care, I’m not very happy,” Sister said.
“You were never happy,” Melissa said. “The last time I saw you laughing was the day that swing broke. Remember that day?”
“Yes. Ray was in it when it went.”
Melissa smiled. “He used to pay me a quarter to sit on his lap and comb his hair.”
“I know,” Sister said. “He still would.”
Melissa hugged herself with her bare arms. “It won’t matter before long. I’m getting old.”
“So is Ray,” Sister said. “But he’s why you come here, I think.”
“So what? There aren’t many people I like, Lily.”
“Me neither.”
“Well, there you are,” Melissa said. “The miracle is, I keep having such a good time. It almost seems wrong.”
“You still do?”
“Every day,” Melissa said, heading back for the stream. “Such a wonderful time.”
Weekday
GUIDRY WAS IN BED, TANGLED in the oversheet. There was rain and something fresh and scented in the wind blowing across the wide floors of his second-story apartment. He was trying to get back a dream he had had, of waves as tall as palisades, which broke down into crisp white lines and lapped and overlapped on a beach.
He went stoop-shouldered into the bathroom to shave, and rested the day’s first cigarette in the empty soap slot of the white sink. Someone had been in his bathroom before him. The tiles under his feet were damp. The bathtub was full of diehard suds.
“Christine?” he yelled.
Guidry found his ex-wife, Christine, on the living room couch. She had taken one of his button-down shirts from the laundry hamper and wrapped it around her hair. She had a beach towel with a Rebel-flag design looped once around her torso.
“Your door wasn’t locked,” she said to Guidry. Her bare legs were very long and they were skinny, with kneecaps like knobs. Her feet were long. She had thin toes.
“I made coffee,” she said. “Or would you like something a little more eye-opening? There’s V-8 and a bottle of vodka in my purse.”
“Coffee,” Guidry said.
“In a minute,” Christine said. She patted a place on the sofa by her hip. “Sit down.”
Guidry left and poured himself coffee in the kitchen, and then he came and stood in the center of the living room with the cup hooked in his fingers. Christine was dabbing cream on her face from a plastic pot.
“You took a bath,” Guidry said.
“I had a bath. I made coffee. I’ll make breakfast. Could you fix that TV?” She was looking at Guidry’s Sony. Electric snow was blurring a daybreak newscast.
Guidry inhaled a mouthful of coffee and went to the TV. He screwed the tuner ring behind the channel selector.
“I don’t want the sound turned up,” Christine said. “Do you?”
Guidry went to the kitchen again and spilled his coffee down the sink. He got a tumbler of ice and a stalk of celery from the refrigerator.
Back in the living room, he squatted by his ex-wife’s purse. It was an olive vinyl purse with a lot of snap pouches and zippers.
“Isn’t Michelle supposed to be up?” Christine said.
Guidry did not answer. He poured from the quart of vodka. He put vegetable juice into his tumbler. He ruffled the red drink with the celery.
“Honey,” Christine said, “do you still smoke? I need a cigarette.”
“Just a minute,” Guidry said.
Christine watched him gobble the drink and mix another one.
“Now,” he said. “Now.”
“Cigarette?” Christine said.
“Just a minute,” Guidry said. He straightened from his crouch and rubbed the beaded glass along his cheek.
“Before you start yelling at me,” Christine said, “don’t you think you should put something on?”
Guidry took his drink into his bedroom. He put on beach trousers. They were baggy and made of white toweling. He brushed the hair off his forehead, using the round mirror over the wardrobe. He was thirty-one, with graying hair and a pinched-looking face. The vodka had made him drunk. He put on a blazer that had double rows of brass buttons.
Christine had positioned a tube-steel chair in the center of the living-room rug. She had made a drink for herself, and had her hair out of the shirt turban. Dark blond swirls massed around her ears and shoulders.
There was a roll of thunder outside the apartment screens, and Christine said, “Uh-oh.”
“Get dressed,” Guidry said. “I’m going to throw you out.”
“I knew you would. I came to see my daughter.”
“Michelle isn’t here,” Guidry said. “She’s at my mother’s.”
/> “Well, I’m going. But first sit down in this chair,” Christine said. She put her hands on the back of the steel chair and shook it.
Guidry sat in the chair. He felt the Rebel-flag towel being draped around his shoulders and stuffed down the collar of his blazer.
“Don’t turn around,” Christine said.
After a moment she came and stood in front of him. She had put on the button-down shirt, and there was an eight-inch comb in her left hand.
Guidry swallowed most of his drink. He said, “Bah.” He chewed the inside of his cheek and looked at the pile of Christine’s belongings that was under the television. There was a crumpled olive dress, a man’s straw hat, a boxed set of records in cellophane, a French dictionary, a few paperbacks, low-heeled shoes, a cigarette holder made of yellow plastic, a copy of L’Officiel, and a pair of designer glasses with turquoise frames.
Christine was walking around with a pair of electric shears. She crammed the prongs of an extension cord into an outlet by the television and tested the clippers. They buzzed. In the breast pocket of the shirt she was wearing were hair scissors. She took them in her left hand and snipped them in the air.
“Tsk, tsk, they’re saying. Can you hear them?” she asked Guidry.
“Are you sober?” he said. “Because if you’re not.”
“Relax,” Christine said. She swallowed some drink and coughed. There was a tomato line on her upper lip.
Guidry squeezed his eyes shut while Christine ran the comb across his scalp. The clippers buzzed in his ears. Soft coils dropped to his lap and onto the floor.
“Oh, man,” he said. “I pity you.”
Christine said, “Do you? Hold still. Why do you pity me?”
“I was looking at your stuff. All the stuff you drag around with you.”
“Um-huh,” she said.
“You lousy big phony,” Guidry said. “You’re getting old, Chris. It isn’t flattering anymore.”
“It isn’t? What isn’t?”
“All that fashion stuff. Going around in towels and underpants.”
She said, “What a crab you are today.”
“I think you hang around with faggots,” Guidry said.
“Don’t forget I’m cutting your hair. You could come out of this looking pretty funny.”
Guidry said, “I don’t think you’re taking your life seriously.”
“Probably not.”
“Not,” Guidry said. “Just not. Your father died last year. Your daughter had her first period, which you don’t even know about.”
“Michelle?” Christine said.
“That’s the one,” Guidry said. “I had to send her up to Mom’s. I know a little about it, but.”
“When?” Christine said.
“A month ago.”
“She’s only ten.”
“She’s eleven.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” Christine said. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to you. I hope you don’t tell her that, though.”
“In fact, we had a party,” Guidry said. “We pretended great joy. Why’d you show up with a French book? You don’t speak French.”
Christine held the electric razor off and handed Guidry a mirror. “It’s a little bit of a shock,” she said.
“Yes,” Guidry said. “I’m now a seventy-year-old.”
“I think it’s nice,” Christine said.
“No you don’t.”
“May I please have a cigarette?” Christine said.
“Bedroom,” Guidry said. “In the shirt drawer. Do you still smoke Camels?”
“I don’t smoke anymore,” she said, and went out. “You look thinner,” Christine said when she came back. “You look like your brother.”
“Listen, I’m sorry—” Guidry began.
The front door to the apartment opened and Michelle stepped into the room.
“Hi,” she said to Christine.
“Good morning,” Christine said. “Do I get a kiss?” Michelle kissed her mother and then her father. “Tell me about your life,” Christine said.
“Well, Grandma’s down in the car. We’re going to Turnbow to the auction, and then to Indian Lake. Dad, I forgot my bathing suit.”
Guidry shook off the towel and went to the apartment’s second bedroom and collected Michelle’s swimsuit.
“Your birthday’s soon, isn’t it?” Christine was saying when Guidry got back. “What would you like?”
“I don’t know,” Michelle said.
A car horn sounded on the street below and Michelle looked concerned.
“Get going,” Guidry said to her.
“You look very nice,” Christine said to Michelle as Michelle was leaving.
“I think you did a good job on his haircut,” Michelle said. She shut the door quietly behind her.
“She is tall,” Christine said, smiling down into the throw rug.
“She is,” Guidry said. “So are you.”
“How tall is she?” Christine said.
“I’ve no idea,” Guidry said. He left the room and took a shower and dressed in his work clothes—shirt, tie, and corduroys. He went to the living room and made himself another drink. Christine was tearing the cellophane off the boxed records.
Guidry said he couldn’t read the cover without his glasses.
“You couldn’t anyway,” Christine said. “It’s French. It’s sixteenth-century. It’s an import.” She lifted the casing on the stereo and positioned the record on the turntable. The music was lutes and violas, flutes and recorders.
Guidry pulled smoke from his cigarette into his mouth and shot it out his nose. He said, “Well, it goes nicely with the rain.”
Christine took a fat white paperback from her olive handbag. She got on the floor, her naked and narrow legs crossed among the curls she had shorn from Guidry’s head. She leaned back on her hands with the book opened in her lap, and began to read aloud over the music.
“I’m sorry,” Guidry said, “but stop right there.”
“What?” Christine said.
“I would never read to you,” he said. “I hate it.”
“Oh, I see,” Christine said. She reached for the cigarette Guidry was smoking. He stooped over and gave it to her.
Christine shoved herself backward along the floor until she was beside her purse. “You want me to go,” she said.
“Ever since you arrived, I’ve wanted you to go,” Guidry said. “You can clean up the bathtub first, and wash your glass. I’ll sweep up the hair shavings myself.”
Christine took the quart of vodka out of her bag and swigged from it. She drank with her head tipped back. Her throat worked eight or nine times. She pulled the bottle away from her mouth and lowered a purple gaze at Guidry. She was a thin-faced woman, with a great deal of last night’s make-up on her eyes. She had a hook nose. “You are pretty smart,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
Christine wagged her head, looking down. “Another reason I came is to tell you I’m getting remarried,” she said.
Guidry said, “Hmm?”
“Yes. But it shouldn’t interest you. He’s homosexual. You were pretty smart.” Christine began to speak quickly: “His name is Chester, which is awful, I know. And he knows. It can’t be shortened to anything better, so it’s just Chester and that’s too bad. He is gay, and he’s ugly and old. Not real old. We aren’t hurting anyone. He’s very funny. You would like him. I’ve told him all about you and he likes you anyway. We’ve decided to call him Uncle Chester for Michelle. He is talented. That’s him playing the fiddle on this record. If you would ever talk to him, you could talk about Proust. He’s practically memorized him. I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t tell me what you think. I will go. I am going as fast as I can gather up my things, except I’ll leave the record. Please, please, don’t say anything else to me until I’m gone.”
Guidry took his cigarette back from Christine and turned down the music. “Well, I’m proud of you,” he said. “I’m proud of u
s.”
“I said not to talk to me,” Christine said. She was bent over, loading both her arms. “I asked please.”
“Look at what you did to my hair!” Guidry said. He pointed to his head.
“I know,” Christine said. “You made me nervous.”
Apostasy
DONNA WAS LATE. SHE LEFT the Camaro running alongside a dumpster and jogged to the all-night drugstore.
Sister Mary Divine Heart stood waiting before a back-lit wall of creams and ointments. Her eyes were bruised from lack of sleep. She wore a trenchcoat, and her hair was bound with a yellow rubber band.
Donna ticked a coin on the display window, and her sister, Sister Mary, covered her grinning mouth with a tissue and came out into the harsh light of the predawn. It was Sunday morning—a watery October. A lake breeze blew, tangling a Plain Dealer between Sister Mary’s legs.
The women drove along the lakefront, listening to a rebroadcast of the Texaco opera on Donna’s car radio. Sister Mary said wasn’t it a peculiar sound track for the bait shops and sagging cottages that rolled by the windshield.
“Were you waiting very long?” Donna said, pushing in the cigarette lighter. “The reason I’m late is Mel and I had to work all night. You remember him? He’s my boss. The congressman? He’s done an article on prosecutorial immunity, and it’s really something. It’s really getting to him. It’s getting to both of us.”
Sister crossed her feet. She said, “I don’t mind waiting. I watched Les Girls on the pharmacist’s portable TV. Anyway, I slept plenty. I slept the whole way back on the Greyhound.”
“What did they tell you in Rochester?” Donna said. She slowed the car and stared at her sister. “They said you’re dying.”
“Probably,” the nun said. “Your last pal.”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” Donna said.
“Well, I’m dying,” Sister said.
The road bent sharply and hugged a little industrial canal that ran by a mile of warehouses before rejoining the sliding surface of the lake.
Donna parked on the yellow grounds behind the cloister’s tamed woodbine and herbarium. Sister Mary got out of the car and stood in the blotchy shade of a partly stripped plum tree, and Donna slid over to the passenger’s seat.
“In a way, I envy you,” Donna called through the window frame.
