75
Margot Whitemore was a sacristan, one of the ladies who set up for Mass, extinguished candles, folded vestments, and discarded leftover communion wine. Unlike the Sunday sacristan, Margot had spark and poured Thursday’s leftovers not into the designated sacred plumbing, but down her own throat.
She had attended college, never married, and was called “Mango” by those who loved her best. Margot was an odd specimen to me, this woman with no children or man to fuss over, with her own house, her own car, coming and going and generally doing whatever she pleased.
Margot and my mother soon became fast friends.
A talker by nature, my mother would engage anyone, anywhere. In Margot, she found a quick mind and an all too rare willingness to discuss topics other than men and children. They talked about birds and gardening and old coins. Margot had studied archaeology, and my mother, who had always been interested in things buried within the earth, could not get enough information. She craved Margot’s knowledge on everything from arrowheads to bodies found in European bogs.
Margot and my mother began having breakfast at the Tip Top Restaurant after Sunday Mass, and going to see movies on a regular basis. Long after their return to the street, they’d sit talking in Margot’s car. Steph and I huddled together and watched them from the upstairs window, wondering what they could have to talk about for so long.
“They’ve been out there for over an hour,” we’d say with disdain, never stopping to consider that we’d been watching for the same amount of time.
“Maybe they’re lesbians,” we’d say, then exhale delicious peals of laughter. We served as our own best evidence that our mother liked men, but despite our laughter, a certain amount of fear lingered. We didn’t need one other thing to remind us that we were nothing like other families.
Margot was generous, but too no-nonsense to make a fuss of her kindness. She’d leave anonymous donations of grape pies and sugar cookies on our front porch. Presents for each child’s birthday. And sometimes, just before our electricity or phone was going to be cut off for nonpayment, we’d find that the bill had been paid or that a bit of money had been left in our mailbox, and we knew Margot had thought of us.
I was glad for my mother and her friendship with Margot. Their outings, the church, and its community seemed to lighten her a bit. At least temporarily. Certainly things were brighter on the days she attended Mass. Still, there were times when I wished she’d never come back to church at all. Like the time she hauled us in for family counseling with Father Shea, and we sat, lumps of various size and shape in his office, while my mother listed off complaints in an inappropriately chirpy voice.
We didn’t listen, she said.
We mouthed back.
We could help more around the house.
As she talked on about how we could be better children, I found myself hating her. For the sound and force of her voice. For whining to an outsider. For taking over my space. I hated Father Shea, too, for his disloyalty (after all, I’d met him first!). When he seemed to take my mother’s side by suggesting regular family meetings, and started asking each of us what made us angry, the betrayal became too much to bear.
I refused to participate. My mouth hung open, I pushed my eyes to the ceiling and glared so hard, I imagined burnt spots remaining on the ceiling tiles long after our departure.
76
In general, I’d become mouthy.
By the time I entered sixth grade and began to understand the way things were, I’d traded in my smart-girl label for smart-ass. I watched the funniest kids at school—those I most admired—and took notes. I learned the art of cracking up a room of eleven-year-olds with a well-placed comment or an easy joke. Still, that was at school, where everyone was a kid or a teacher, and no one really knew me.
Church was different. Everyone was kind, and I wore their warmth like a fur-lined coat. I needed them, loved them even, but I’d become bad anyway. Despite the fact that it was a sanctuary, or perhaps because of it, I learned the limits, then pushed at them.
Like the time I gave Father Shea a wedgie at Charlotte Beach. He was swimming in denim cut-offs while a group of kids played Marco Polo. It was a parish picnic, the mood was high, water was freedom, and in truth, men’s underwear was becoming an appealing mystery to me. The temptation of the blue and yellow-lined elastic waistband peeking out from the priest’s shorts proved too much for me. I grabbed hold, looked to the sky, and pulled as high and hard as I could. I knew it was wrong even as I lifted his underwear, but his shock and subsequent forgiveness satisfied something in me, so I continued.
While serving Mass, I sat beside Father Shea and moved my feet in fidgety boredom. I swung my legs in wide circles, laughed at the wrong times, used the altar as my own personal stage. I stretched my face into various expressions of pain or hilarity, tried to get people to notice me. All of which led to my removal as altar girl.
“I’m sorry,” the normally patient priest said, “this just isn’t working.”
I was crushed, had not realized until it was taken away how much I liked sitting by his side and taking charge of ringing the bells during Mass. I apologized and begged. How could I go on, I thought, without wearing a white robe, and washing Father Shea’s hands at Mass?
After a few weeks probation, he took me back.
But I was also fired from the Passion Play—the very same Easter production that saw my longhaired brother strapped to the cross in the role of Jesus several years in a row. Anthony had never excelled at speech, could barely manage English, and the few lines of Hebrew he was given were a cruel taffy in his mouth, but with his long curls, ink-blue eyes set under dark brows, and ruddy skin haloed by a crown of thorns, he looked the part.
I watched him practice from the pew I’d been banished to, and longed to be Veronica, the woman who dried Jesus’ face and was rewarded with his image on her veil. I wanted to be the pious and lovely Veronica, had memorized her one line, and could say it heartfelt into a mirror.
“My lord,” I’d say, my eyes wet with love as I pushed a dishtowel toward my own reflection.
I’d practiced holding her veil time and time again, but always, I was selected as crowd-person number three, and always, I’d rebel with salt-soaked laughter until I was removed.
Or demoted.
At Christmas, I was asked to reconsider my position as singing angel in the Nativity play when I didn’t seem to take it seriously. I did take it seriously; I just burned at not being dark-haired enough to play Mary, not being boy enough to play Magi. If anything, I took it too seriously, which made my relegation to the choir sting all the more.
“No,” I said when threatened with losing even that small role, “I can do it.”
This to Sister Margie, the no-nonsense nun who worked with excons all day and was immune to charm. After one sarcastic saying too many, she took me to her office and wondered aloud if the part of singing angel was too much for me.
“No, Sister, I’ll be good,” I said, “I promise.”
She was smart and tough, but underneath it all, a nun, and therefore, given to blind faith. Had she been as shrewd as she was kind, Sister Margie would have fired me permanently, for as it turned out, the weight of my tin-foil and cardboard wings proved too heavy.
On Christmas Eve, as we huddled under the organ loft, waiting for our cue to parade into the church, I eyed the gauzy wings strapped to the backs of the other angels, noticed how fine their halos were—strands of silk roses—while mine was just a bit of used garland tied round my head. They wore white ballet slippers and lace tights, while I wore sneakers and jeans under a borrowed robe. They looked like miniature brides; I looked like a cartoon.
The comparison curled my lip. Envy and shame combined with an overall holiday giddiness that only intensified as we processed through the crowd of hundreds and onto the steps along the length of the high altar.
Glo-or-or-or-ri-aa, came our sweet song as we faced the Christmas crowd.
The swirl of giggles started out in my belly, and soon took the place of the Gloria in my mouth. Starting out small, the laughter grew as the line of angels settled into formation, arranged by height against a backdrop of alabaster saints.
The holiday congregants smiled and waved and were clearly enchanted by the glitter of wings, the lilt of young voices, and everything was lovely until Mary Lou Sulli, the angel next to me, heard my mangled laughter and choked on her singing, too. Mary Lou nudged my shoulder, but when that did not stop me, she became infected by my poison and began to giggle and lose her place in the song. She laughed. An accidentally robust guffaw. Soon, the entire line of angels shook. Wings fluttered as laughter overtook Latin and we crumpled to the floor, one at a time, a series of haloed dominoes falling to earth.
77
One minute I was at my desk, looking out the window, and the next, someone was at the classroom door, calling out my name. His face was a blur, as if his features had been crafted of putty, and I realized as I approached that I did not know him.
“There was an incident at home,” the man said. “No one was hurt,” he added, as the words were settling into my head, “but you need to leave school early today.”
An incident, I thought, and while I knew the word, I could not grasp just then what it meant.
A couple of older kids were waiting in the office to escort me home. Neighbors. High-school kids who were done with school for the day. They looked at me from the sides of their eyes as we walked, but wouldn’t say what happened, even when I asked.
“We’re not supposed to tell,” they said with puffed-out frowns, and I knew that they were feeling full of themselves, could see that the weight of their knowledge was like loose change jingling in their pockets. They looked at each other as they walked and I began to hate them for their secret. I decided to stop asking and instead simply picked up my pace, finally breaking into a trot.
“Don’t worry,” they called, their voices taking on the tones of high drama, “it’s nothing too bad.”
It wasn’t until I’d rounded the corner from Webster Avenue to Lamont Place that I saw the fire engines lining the street.
A fire, I thought. There’s been a fire.
An incident.
The street was filled with people who had gathered and stood huddled and staring at the dark smoke coming from the windows of our house. I was welcomed into the crowd with pats to the shoulder and hugs. “It’s okay,” everyone kept saying, “things will be just fine.”
I watched as firemen went in and out of the house, then followed the smoke to its source, took in the bashed-in windows and black stains running down the gold shingles.
Steph walked over and told me what had happened.
Lisa had been working on crafts. She’d been on a craft kick for months, in fact, using matches to burn the edges of pictures of Holly Hobbie or speckled fawns, then shellacking them to hunks of wood and mounting them onto walls. She created plaques to hang in her room and anywhere else she could find space. That day, it seems, she’d laced up the edge of some cute thing, thrown her match into a wastebasket, then gone downstairs for a bath. While she bathed, the match rekindled itself and started a fire.
I looked around for my oldest sister. Lisa was nowhere in sight. Steph said she’d been crying.
“Why?” I asked. Nothing ever seemed to bother Lisa. She walked around the house with a stiff back and a dark look. I barely spoke to her for fear of incurring her wrath, and had not seen her cry since Albion so many years before, when the kids on the bus had teased us for being poor.
“She feels guilty,” Steph said. “All our stuff is ruined, and she thinks it’s her fault.”
I looked at the house again as things began to be hauled out front. People shook their heads at our losses, and the atmosphere was heavy, until talk turned to the small Bible that had been handed out of the house.
“Everything was burnt to a crisp,” the neighbors said, “metal furniture, clothes, everything—except a Bible.”
Their eyes glowed as they began to celebrate the magic of the book’s survival. Even my mother seemed hungry for a miracle. She took the “Good News” Bible into her hands, flipped through the onion-skin pages, a smile lighting her face.
78
The school psychologist leaned in, asked if I was angry.
I shrugged.
He asked if I liked school.
I nodded.
He asked if I liked reading.
I nodded.
He asked if I liked to play sports.
My head tipped, then returned to its socket.
“Which ones?” he wanted to know.
“Baseball and street hockey,” I said. “Sometimes football.”
“Tackle or touch?”
When I said both, he asked what position I liked in baseball, and when I said pitching, he asked why that might be, and after I said I liked throwing, he said “hmmmm” and asked whether I liked to throw the ball hard or soft.
“Hard,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” he said again, this time with more emphasis, then leaned back into the chair with the orange plastic cushion. The chair creaked as he pushed his pen between his lips and looked at me as though I were a bug that had just crept into his kitchen. I sat still, wondering why he’d plucked me from class.
Earlier that year, a similarly inclined man had pulled me from class to inquire about the blisters on my arm—blisters I hadn’t even noticed until he and the nurse had pointed and looked hard at my face for an answer. “I don’t know,” I answered, mush-mouthed, only to realize halfway through the interview that the blisters must have come from sleeping near the radiator; my arm often flopped onto it while I slept, and sometimes burned. I told them that we had radiators, that we pushed our mattresses against them in winter. They seemed only partly satisfied by the radiator-burn explanation, but let me go. So, sitting in front of the man in the creaky orange chair, I wondered whether perhaps I had another blister on my arm.
One I hadn’t noticed.
The blisters really had come from the radiator, but clearly there was the look of a liar about my face, a certain dip and tug in the eyes often mistaken for guilt.
“So you like to throw things, do you?”
I looked around the tidy office for clues to the right answer, and, seeing none, decided to take his lead.
I nodded.
“Is that why you kept slamming the door at Ms. McDonough’s last night—even after she expressly told you not to?”
At the mention of “Ms. McDonough,” my mind caught up, and finally, I understood.
I was living with Kara McDonough and the Johnson children. Ever since the fire, the family had been split up during renovations, and Steph and I had been assigned to Kara’s place.
He repeated his question, “Is that why you disobeyed Ms. McDonough?”
“I guess so.”
I slept in Vicky Johnson’s room, where the night before, she and I had talked about boys and clothes and kissing—what made some French and some just plain kissing.
I had closed the door, though Kara had said not to. Her ears must have caught the click of the door as soon as it shut, because two seconds later, the door was reopened, with Kara standing there, staring at us as if an apology was expected.
“God, can’t we have some privacy?” I said and sucked my teeth.
Kara said she wanted the door open, and when I asked why, she answered that’s just how things were, and I’d better get used to following rules.
Kara was strong—a social worker who spent her days looking into swollen faces and sad stories. Unrelenting lines were painted onto her broad Irish face.
Me, I had nothing but my mouth to back me up.
My mouth, and the overwhelming desire to try Vicky’s blusher in private, to ask about what boys say when they’re trying to get up under her shirt, to listen to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” while prancing around in high heels and pink satin shorts.
So, once again,
I closed the door.
And Kara, strong-willed and silent, opened it.
I closed.
She opened.
Back and forth. Over and over, until she grew tired and left the door closed, so that I thought I’d won, only to find the door off its hinges when we woke.
We had giggled that morning and Kara seemed only mildly annoyed, so I thought it was done, but clearly, I was wrong, because there I was, sitting in front of a blunt-faced man who seemed to know all about the door and Kara, and was asking whether I liked to throw a ball hard or soft.
Now that I knew why I was there, I explained.
I admitted to being angry that the fire had consumed my entire bedroom, including the new maple bunk-bed set my mother had just taken off layaway. I said I missed my family, my street, all my old things, and that’s why I was behaving badly.
He nodded his head and believed.
Though I was lying. The fact was, I loved Kara’s house—the well-stocked fridge, the sparkling microwave, piles of clean towels. New clothes had replaced worn plaid pants and a “Put the Lid on Rats” T-shirt featuring a flesh-tailed rodent creeping his way into an open garbage can. The toothy critter was a free decal given to city kids to enlist their support in Rochester’s antirat campaign. I’d ironed the rat and his garbage can onto a white T-shirt and wore it till the rat was cracked and the cotton gray. Gone now, the rat shirt had been replaced by crisp whites and yellows, turtlenecks with rainbow decals.
In truth, my life had only improved at Kara’s. After all, Steph was the only one I’d ever really needed, and she was right there with me. With all the bright walls and balanced meals, Kara’s suburban neighborhood was like a TV commercial for laundry soap.
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