by Alena Dillon
Maria’s face reddened and she tugged on the hem of her pants. For a moment, Evelyn wondered what it would have been like to want to make her legs smooth for someone else’s caress, to think of her body as a shared entity, a gift. But Maria’s embarrassment was more pressing than such wistful ponderings. She cleared her throat and addressed Desiree. “Dear, it has nothing to do with being nuns. We don’t shave our legs because we’re old.”
Chapter 7
Desiree
I was fourteen when Daryl circled me like some Discovery Channel great white. He was twenty. My momma was cracked out—still is—and I never met the sperm half of my gene pool, so I must have looked like an orphaned seal pup to Daryl, just floating out there in the open waters of the projects, all by herself. And he was smooth. He walked me home from school. Asked me about my day. He even bought me the Phat Farm kicks I wanted and a daily McDonald’s Big N’ Tasty. A Big N’ Tasty was as good as a diamond ring to a hungry girl with my kind of booty. He was my hero. And yeah, if you want to get all Freudian about it, maybe I thought of him like a father too. The boy didn’t have to work too hard. I was in love with his onion ass in no time. It didn’t hurt that he was fine as hell.
And yeah, he banged me when I was a minor. But what girl from my block made it to sixteen without getting her hymen pounded to shit, whether she wanted it or not? That wasn’t the worst thing he did. Not even close.
One day after school, we was lying around naked at his crib, smoking a blunt in bed when, out of nowhere, he started to cry. I’d never seen a grown-ass man cry before, especially not Daryl. He was hardcore hood. He hardly ever laughed, never mind cried.
I begged him to tell me what was wrong. He was quiet at first, but eventually he admitted he was in deep with some thugs. He said they was gonna kill him. And I believed it. After all, they didn’t call it Do or Die Bed-Stuy for nothing.
“How much?” I asked.
He couldn’t even look at me. “A G. By tomorrow.” I didn’t even know what that kind of paper looked like. “And there ain’t nothing I can do. They won’t let me deal.”
I pushed myself to my knees and let the bedsheet drop so my little-girl breasts was showing. That always cheered him up. “What about me? Maybe I can start selling to pay back your money.”
His eyes were red and watery. “You’d do that? For real?”
The sight of him so weak and grateful nearly broke me in two. I nodded.
He ran his fingers down the side of my cheek and looked at me like I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And the most important. “’Cause, if you ain’t frontin’, there is one thing you could do.”
“What?”
“They won’t let you sell. Sharpie made some deal and they don’t let youngins on the street no more. But he did say there was one way you could wipe my debt clean.”
I grabbed his wrist. “I’ll do it.”
“He wants you to blow him.”
I sat back and pulled the sheet up to cover my chest. “Nuh-uh.”
“You know I wouldn’t ask unless I had to. You’re my girl, Des. But I told him you’re mad good at it, and now he wants to see for himself.”
“I ain’t no hood rat.”
“It ain’t like that. It’s just one time. If you don’t do it, I’m dead. Is that what you want?”
I thought about coming home from school every day to my momma sprawled out on the couch, her eyes rolled back in her head, her face scabby as hell. Who knew who she sucked off that day for dope. There, in Daryl’s crib, he held me. He looked at me like I was something. Without him, I was nothing. Nobody. Was I really not gonna do one bad thing, a bad thing my momma did every day of the week, to save his life? To save us?
So I did it, just like he knew I would, probably from the moment he first laid eyes on me walking down Myrtle Avenue, a kid who was so lonely she talked loud and often, just so someone would look her way.
Maybe he was never in deep with Sharpie to begin with.
It wasn’t long after the first favor that Daryl asked for another. And if I did it once, why wouldn’t I do it again? So I gave head to one guy after the other. Then I let them fuck me. Pretty soon it was just an easy way for me and Daryl to make bank.
He had me workin’ for a few months before he started to ghost. First he wasn’t home at his usual times. Then he didn’t answer the phone. Then he didn’t return my calls at all. Turns out he was circling some other tween in the projects. Because Daryl is a hustler. He never loved me. He was just stackin’ chips, like any good player. And I wasn’t his only hand.
By the time I figured him out, I’d become a hustler too. What was I gonna do? Join the army? The nunnery? Hell no. I dropped out of school. I kept working. I was a hood rat for real now.
It was around then that Sister Evelyn found me. I was chillin’ at the bottom of the slide in the Marcy Projects playground, waiting for my ten o’clock to show, when this fat-ass white lady came up on me. There’s no good reason for a Casper to be on Myrtle Avenue that time of night, so I came to the only conclusion there was. “If you came for some pootie tang, I’m busy, but I’ll get to you in a minute.”
“That’s a very kind offer,” she said. “But you can’t afford me.”
I made a snapping sound with my gum. “I don’t pay for that shit. And definitely not with someone whose pussy spits dust.”
And the bitch actually laughed. “Yes, I’m sure I’ve outgrown the market. I’m just here to tell you, if you ever want to look into other professions, we can help you at Mercy House. You’re clever. God gave you a brain—you should use it.”
“Mercy House? You ain’t from around here, are you? You mean Marcy Houses.”
“No, I mean Mercy House. It isn’t a project. It’s a house on Chauncey Street. You’ve been handed some disadvantages. We aren’t a cure-all; just a safe place, if you need one. And maybe we can provide a few resources to help you level the playing field. When you’re ready, look for the angel doorknocker. You deserve to love and to be loved.”
“Thanks, but I’m good,” I said. “I’m good just where I am.”
And I was. Sure, it wasn’t a girl’s dream come true, but it wasn’t so bad either.
Then Daryl, the father-figure, love-of-my-life-turned-dirty-ass pimp, started showing up at my door, demanding more and more of my earnings. First twenty percent, then fifty, then ninety. And if I shorted him, he beat me. Punched me in the ribs, grabbed a fistful of hair and rammed my face into the wall, choked me until I made these ugly gagging sounds. All while my momma was passed out on the couch in the next room. Sometimes she’d moan or tell him to quit it, but most of the time it was all she could do just to keep breathing.
With each pounding I felt like an organ would burst, or that my skull would crack open.
The last time I saw him, he knocked my head so hard I blacked out. When I came to, my left eye was swollen shut and my right eye was stuck closed with dried blood. I forced it open and found a head-shaped hole in the drywall.
He almost killed me for doing what I started doing to save his life. People who read thick books call that shit irony.
Well, I wasn’t about to fuck for damn near free, and Daryl wasn’t about to stop collecting whatever the hell he wanted to collect. I needed a quiet place to think about how to get out of that mess.
When I came up on Chauncey Street, my whole body hurting something fierce, the block was lit up like a damn Christmas movie. It looked like the view of Manhattan at night, with all those twinkling buildings. I’m not one to get emotional, but you never would have known it from the tears I cried as I walked up that sparkling street to the house with the angel doorknocker.
A stranger I’d later know as Sister Maria answered and gathered me in her arms. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been held by someone who wasn’t paying me. She smelled like sugar cookies, like a grandma from a storybook. “Oh you poor thing,” she said. “Come here. You’re safe now.”
I appreciated
Sister Maria’s love. It was like being welcomed into a foreign country. But I wanted to talk to Sister Evelyn. Even then I knew she’d been through something. Something that had taught us the same language.
Chapter 8
After the GIA meeting concluded, Evelyn finally had time to consider what the sisters should do about the Hawk’s imminent landing. It would take time to prepare the house—to cleanse the house, more like. They had to revise their past, rehearse their show. She needed to get to work.
Evelyn ascended the stairs to the second floor. Down the hall, she flicked on the light, lifted onto her tiptoes, and reached for the string attached to the attic door. God must have run out of Fanning family height genes by the time Evie’s angry red baby face made its way into the world, because she felt almost as wide as she was tall. The underused muscles hiding inside her thick calves quivered. She clamped the string knot between her index and middle finger and heaved it down, inciting a hot sear through her wrist and elbow, but the hatch relented. The wooden ladder unfolded easily, and Evelyn guided her foot onto the first rung. It creaked. She was too old and too fat to be climbing rickety ladders, but there were worse ways to die, if it came to that.
When Evelyn was waist-deep into the storage space, she let her belly drop forward onto the plywood floor. Her feet, which had hardened into talons in an attempt to curl around the rungs, relaxed, and she sighed.
The attic was dim, dank, and smelled of mothballed sweaters. It was largely uncluttered, as the women didn’t own much. There were two boxes labeled “CHRISTmas Decorations,” bursting with ornaments, an olivewood nativity scene, candles for the neighborhood windows, and colored lights, all of which the obsessive-compulsive Josephine had promptly dismantled, packed up, and stored on New Year’s Day. There was an air mattress for extending their capacity, which Evelyn only then remembered the existence of. There were three boxes labeled with each of the sisters’ names, reserved for storing photo albums and other keepsakes that would take up too much space, or be too distracting, in their bedrooms, which were reserved for rest and prayer. There was a cardboard wardrobe box Maria had labeled “Bad Habits,” which contained the full-length and modified woolen robes they hadn’t worn in forty years, the uniforms that at times swathed Evelyn in security and at other times suffocated her. Evelyn thought it was a sadder version of brides preserving and storing their gowns, and yet she was tempted to open that box, to revisit the uniforms. But she wasn’t in the attic for casual remembrances; she was there to sift through storage file box after storage file box of former residents’ records.
Mercy House was founded in 1984, back when Evelyn was still working as a nurse, after she’d treated the same patient five times for various injuries of domestic violence. She felt like she was constantly wiping blood away without ever bothering to clot the wound. Her efforts were futile, a waste of time and resources. After listening to another one of Evelyn’s many rants on the subject in the common room of their convent, Josephine finally threw up her arms and said, “Well, why don’t you do something about it?”
Evelyn had paused, her mouth still open, full of unspoken words of outrage. Then she closed it, swallowed those words, and smiled. “Why don’t we do something?”
Maria, who had also been on the receiving end of Evelyn’s venting more than once, jumped up from her seat on the couch and cried, “Me too, me too!”
They all contributed their strengths to the project. As a true academic and philosopher, Josephine was invaluable in the initial research, writing proposals and mission statements, and applying for grants. Evelyn served as their boots on the ground. She was relentless in scouting facilities, interviewing the operators of similar services, and following up with grant organizations that failed to get in touch promptly. Maria was an excellent cheerleader, providing pep talks when the outcome seemed bleak and infectious enthusiasm when presenting their case to Mother Superior. When Mother Superior finally decided every detail of their vision was clear and feasible, she met with Father John and didn’t leave his office until he approved.
Sister Evelyn, Sister Maria, and Sister Josephine went from friends to partners, although the latter wasn’t grand enough a word to encapsulate the relationship of love and support that had cultivated since the initial founding. They’d become more like family than Evelyn’s own siblings, who had long since drifted from her life.
Twenty-five years later and here they were, still seeking to bridge the gap between what their population of women deserved and all the ways in which society had failed them through inequitable education; unaffordable housing; mass incarceration; low wages and unemployment; and a cycle of poverty, addiction, and abuse. It was the longest Evelyn had spent doing any one thing, perhaps because it was the most satisfying—more satisfying than prayer, more satisfying than religious education, and even more satisfying than nursing. Although, she still used her nursing on occasion. There had been times—periods of extreme need—when she put her skills to work. Most recently, nine years prior, when she volunteered at a local hospital treating victims and emergency workers on 9/11, and fielding phone calls from frantic family members so they could hear a human voice rather than a recording. And before that, when Mercy House initially opened, she juggled two full-time jobs: working with AIDS patients by day and sheltering abused women by night. But, all in all, the last two and a half decades of her life had been devoted to this Bed-Stuy shelter and its residents, all of whose cases had been carefully cataloged in the ten or so boxes before her.
Evelyn stared at the collection with her fists on her hips. Sifting through all this material in a mere week would be a task of biblical proportions—not to mention the not-insignificant censoring that would be required.
Where to begin? she wondered. Undoubtedly, as God did. In the beginning.
* * *
May 1994
Evelyn dry heaved in the waiting room bathroom during the first abortion. She gripped the porcelain rim of the toilet and whispered the Prayer of Saint Francis into the bowl as a strand of discolored drool stretched down from her bottom lip. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith . . .”
The patient that day was a soft-spoken woman named Vanessa. She had coarse brown curls and skin the rich color and gloss of an espresso bean. She’d been pulled over for a blown taillight, and when she admitted having marijuana in her possession, the police officer dragged her from her vehicle, handcuffed her, and shoved her in the back of his squad car. He directed his partner to go get a cup of coffee. Then he asked Vanessa what she was willing to do to avoid jail time; he didn’t wait for an answer before he unbuckled his pants.
Vanessa was at Mercy House for several days before she shared her story. When Evelyn begged her to report it, Vanessa said, “What’s the sense in reporting a crime to the very people who committed it?” Weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant, and pounded her still-flat belly with her fists.
In the days that followed Vanessa’s discovery, there was a vacant quality in her eyes that unsettled Evelyn. Finally, over a bowl of oatmeal that was cooling into a congealed crust, Vanessa said with resolve, “I need to have an abortion.” In the moment, Evelyn only cleared her dish, scraping its contents into the garbage. But after many periods of prayer, she came to a decision. She wouldn’t have guessed she’d come to such a progressive revelation at fifty-four years of age, but a voice inside Evelyn told her it was the right thing to do. She would claim it was God’s voice, but nobody would have believed her. She would also claim it was her conscience, because she was starting to believe they were one in the same.
Vanessa emerged from the procedure with a stony expression, her suffering only apparent through trembling hands and red-rimmed eyes that were once again suggesting signs of life. Evelyn suppressed her doubts about what they’d done—she would wrestle them on her own time. She took Vanessa by the elbow and guided her onto city streets that roa
red with activity—honking horns, rushing commuters, dog walkers, strolling lovers—where everybody else carried on as if an unborn child had not just been terminated.
In their living room that night, after the girls had gone to sleep, Evelyn told Maria and Josephine what she had condoned, and even facilitated. Maria covered her face with her hands. Every muscle in Josephine’s body tightened; she stood as hard and unmoving as an obelisk.
“How dare you,” Josephine seethed between gritted teeth. “What you did was not only ungodly, it was selfish. How could you fail to consult us over something that could impact us in such a powerful way?”
“What does this have to do with you?” Evelyn asked, as an accusation.
Josephine looked as if she might burst from her skin. “If the church finds out, if they even suspect something, we will be excommunicated. Kicked to the curb. What will we do then? How will we survive without support, at our age?”
“A woman was raped. By a policeman. A woman extinguished a life growing inside her, and that’s what concerns you at this moment? What will happen to us?”
Something violent flashed in Josephine’s eyes. “Oh, Evelyn. You are so right. It is the least of the issue, but it is the only speck I have the courage to confront at this moment. I don’t wish to imagine the life you stole from that fetus: who she might have become, what she might have done, how she might have glorified the Lord. I don’t want to ask you how you will live with yourself. I don’t want to reproach you for daring to play God. Because I fear the anger inside me right now, Evelyn. And I fear the sadness too.”
Evelyn’s heart hurt from guilt, anger toward Josephine, and the knowledge that she was probably right. “Your sorrow? Your sorrow?” she demanded. Her voice escalated, until rage cracked open into weeping. Maria hurried across the room and took Evelyn into her arms.
Through their vow of obedience, they’d committed themselves as servants of the Catholic Church, an institution that had been very clear about its stance on abortion. Exodus 21:23 stated a strike against a pregnant woman that resulted in injury to the child should be punished with eye for an eye, or “life for life.” And the church’s acceptance of abortion hadn’t evolved much in the thousands of years since the biblical ages. Pope John Paul II said the church’s teaching on the subject was “unchanged and unchangeable. . . . No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.” Pope John Paul II was, in many ways—and especially when it came to female reproductive rights—a holy but wholly pigheaded man; he wasn’t Evelyn’s favorite leader, but he wasn’t her least favorite either.
