by Dave Reidy
I missed my mother right then. I like to think that it’s because I missed my mother that I decided, despite the fact that we’d just met and that she’d just been crying, that I’d ask Catherine to have lunch with me.
“Once more people at St. Asella’s find out about Rose Marie’s diagnosis,” Catherine said, “Jeanne is going to have a lot of help. She won’t cook or clean for weeks.”
I smiled at what I’d assumed was a kind of joke—how could the people of St. Asella’s help Jeanne when they were scarcely able to help themselves? But when I glanced at Catherine, I saw no sign that she was kidding around.
“How will people find out?” I asked.
Catherine shrugged. “I’ll tell them.”
We veered toward the curb, moving around the low, wrought-iron fence that defined the sidewalk eating area of a restaurant called Local Bistro. Enormous oval plates garnished with fresh fruit were heaped with pancakes drowning in syrup and French toast smeared with whipped cream. Potatoes, cubed and browned, surrounded omelets flecked with red and green peppers. Flatware clanked against ceramic, and a baby, only his chubby legs and blue ankle socks visible from beneath a stroller’s sun canopy, squealed for his parents.
At an opening in the fence, I stopped and tossed my thumb in the direction of the door, turned to Catherine, waggling as I did, and asked, “Would you like to have lunch with me?”
What I meant was: Show me your place in the world.
Catherine’s eyes grew with surprise. Then she dropped them and smiled.
“I can’t,” she said.
Flushing with embarrassment, I waggled in plain view. “No problem.” I started walking east again. Then I added, “Maybe some other time.”
In that moment, I had no intention of asking Catherine out again. Ever. I was simply trying to save face: Catherine would pretend to remain open to the idea of our having lunch together at some point in the future, and I’d wordlessly agree never to ask her to lunch again. But Catherine kept going.
“Simon, I’m newly divorced, and people at St. Asella’s know it. You lector there. I’m the cantor. And I have no plans to get an annulment or anything like that. So,” she said, “I can’t see you. Socially.”
She stared at me, waiting for me to affirm what she’d said.
Does she expect me to believe that our having lunch would get her thrown out of that desperate parish?
And what if it did? Why would Catherine let St. Asella’s and its misfits stand in the way of anything she wanted in the world she inhabited every hour of the week but one?
She wouldn’t, I decided. No one would. Which meant that Catherine wasn’t interested in me and was going out of her way to ensure I knew nothing would change how she felt.
I should have been able to take this rejection in stride, but I made an adolescent’s mistake: I allowed my hurt feelings to stir up memories of Brittany telling me we were finished. I started living both rejections at once, right there on the sidewalk. The shame of them heated the blood in my face and my stomach twisted with anxiety.
Sweating from the forehead, I waggled twice and said, “I think I understand.”
Catherine nodded, smiling. “I knew you would.”
I kept walking with Catherine because I didn’t know what else to do. If I’d had a good excuse to leave, I would have taken as many waggles as I needed to say it. But I couldn’t come up with one, so I kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Breaking the painful silence, Catherine picked up the conversation about where she’d left it, as if I’d never asked her to lunch. “Poor Jeanne,” she said, shaking her head. “What an awful scene she’s returning home to. Thank God she has St. Asella’s. My father used to say that even when everything else in your life is coming apart, you can still count on community, if you’re part of a good one. And St. Asella’s is a good one, you know?”
I got the idea that Catherine was giving me a pep talk, including St. Asella’s and its community in a list of parting gifts I’d receive now that I’d been denied a place in her real world. With a little less pain in my gut and embarrassment clouding my head, I might have heard that Catherine’s pep talk had been intended as much for herself as for me. But what I heard was her trying to lump me in with the misfits she tended. And what I did was take her little pep talk apart.
“I don’t know if it’s a good one,” I said. “And I don’t think community is good for much.”
“What?”
“If anyone shows up at Jeanne’s door with buckets and rags or a hot meal,” I said, “community won’t have anything to do with it. Any help she gets will come because of you.”
Catherine shook her head and smiled, as if I simply didn’t understand the way a community worked.
“Me and a lot of other people.”
“No, I was there last week, when you weren’t. I saw none of the community you’re talking about. No one was hanging around on the sidewalk, chatting away. How many of the people you’ll ask to help Jeanne know her already?”
Catherine moved her head back and forth, calculating.
“Not know of her,” I said. “Know her. How many of them have been to her house? How many say anything more than hello when they see her?”
Catherine stared at me. She seemed surprised to find herself in an argument.
I shrugged without taking a waggle—I didn’t need one. “They’re strangers to each other,” I said. “A parishioner at St. Asella’s is no more likely to help me than anyone on the street would be. And the people who don’t know Jeanne personally, but help her anyway, will do it because they know you.”
“All right,” Catherine said. “Simplest terms. Where would Jeanne have gone this morning if there were no St. Asella’s?”
I shrugged again. “A coffee shop,” I said. “Or a restaurant. Does it matter?” Then I said, “Maybe she would have stayed at home with her dying sister.”
As soon as I’d said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. In trying to make a point about community at St. Asella’s, I’d implied that Jeanne had been wrong to leave her sister, and the exhausting duties of caring for her, for even one hour. I meant every negative thing I’d said about St. Asella’s, but I regretted having said anything at all about Jeanne. I should have told Catherine this. I did not.
I was taking the waggles I needed to say I’ve got to go, when Catherine said, “This is me.”
We stood before seven stories of molded cement accented with green plate glass. On the other side of the double doors, an older African-American man wearing a dark jacket and tie sat behind a tall wooden desk in a marble foyer that led to a set of elevator doors. Even a kid from outside Peoria could see that this was an apartment building. I had walked Catherine home, another bitter consolation prize in a game I had lost badly.
Catherine turned to me with a practiced, professional air of courtesy.
“Thank you, Simon,” she said. “I’ll hope to see you next Sunday.”
That Catherine would invite me back to St. Asella’s, after what I’d said about the place and its people, made me realize that my ranting about strangers and heaping judgment upon old women had only served to confirm for her that I was just another misfit. All hope of showing Catherine that I was someone like her, a person with a place in the world, was lost. I could’ve collapsed in a pile and wept.
She pulled the handle of the lobby’s glass door and walked in without another word. She greeted the doorman, and his face lit up with a smile that lifted the ends of his black moustache. I watched Catherine wait for the elevator, her back to me. Then I noticed the doorman staring at me through the green glass. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
•••
AFTER A WEEK of waiting in vain for the memory of my bungled interaction with Catherine to fade, and for Elaine or Connor or anyone else to call me, hope was hard to come by. To make matters worse, having begged off of my lectoring commitment, I’d given up my best chance to prepare for the voiceover work I was waiting for. So I stayed in my apartmen
t, the only place in the world where I felt I belonged, and waited. I’d left myself with little else to do.
Outside my living-room window, the Tuesday-afternoon-rush hour had begun. Cars and trucks on Bartlett Street accelerated through expiring yellow lights and ran brand-new reds as they made their way to and from the interstate. Office workers cutting out of work early—men in collared, bright plaid shirts and pleated pants, women in short-sleeve, silk blouses and flared slacks that covered all but the pointy toes of their high heels—crossed Bartlett and entered the tavern on the corner or continued on to a bus or a train or a parked car. Seeing so many people coming from somewhere and going somewhere else needled my envy and my shame. Surely these people were waiting for something big to happen in their lives, just as I was. But they were doing something while they waited.
In front of the sagging three-flat next door to mine, an elderly woman pushed a two-wheeled aluminum cart nearly filled with groceries packed in white plastic bags. The cart seemed to be doubling as a walker for the woman, who walked slowly and with a slight limp. What little downward pressure she could apply to the cart’s handle was barely enough to keep its short, cylindrical front legs from scraping the sidewalk.
In about half a minute, the woman traveled two sidewalk squares—about ten feet. The nearest grocery I’d found—a Jewel Foods store—was six blocks away. At that pace, she must have been walking for the better part of an hour. Her cheeks were glazed with sweat, but the woman seemed calm and unconcerned, as if she had no doubt she’d get where she was going.
Her facial expression of patience and confidence helped me place the woman: she was from St. Asella’s. I hadn’t recognized her without a four-footed cane in her hand and her aged husband teetering at her side. I was not excited to see anyone from St. Asella’s—I wanted no reminder of my disagreement with Catherine and of her distant, benevolent invitation to join the ranks of the misfits already in her charge—but if I had no choice but to see someone from the parish I’d left behind, I was glad it was this woman. Looking back from a short distance made safe by my certainty that I would never return there, I decided that, of all the people I had encountered at St. Asella’s, and despite the fact that we’d never spoken to one another, I liked this woman best.
From behind my open blinds, I watched the woman pass in front of my apartment. She was at the foot of my building’s cement front steps when a front leg of her cart caught the edge of a deep crack in the sidewalk. She staggered into a lame hop, keeping her feet beneath her, but her cart twisted and toppled with a metallic crash. A red, gelatinous sauce spilled out of a cracked glass jar. Lettuce lay limp on the sidewalk. Two oranges mimicked the traffic racing away from the highway until one fell into the gutter and the other came to a rest in front of the barred windows of the corner tavern.
The woman dropped her hands to her side and stared at the mess. Then she took two unsteady steps forward, bent gingerly at the waist and knees, and reached for a fallen plum.
I stepped into the nearest pair of shoes I could find and hurried out of my apartment. To be clear, that the woman was from St. Asella’s had no bearing on my going out to help. Any halfway decent person would have found it impossible to stand by while the woman risked breaking her hip to pick up groceries.
By the time I’d run down my stairs to the sidewalk, the woman was slowly unfolding herself to upright, like a science-fiction radio-show alien emerging from a long journey in the tight confines of an egg-shaped pod. In her hand was the plum she had reached for. I slowed to a walk, for fear of scaring her. Taking a waggle, I leaned into her field of vision.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
Both of her legs were shaking with destabilizing tremors, and she looked worried in a way she hadn’t before, as if this accident had made her suddenly aware of a weakness she’d been ignoring.
“Would you mind if I helped you?” I asked.
Her graceful smile flickered. “Please,” she said. “Thank you.”
I righted the grocery cart to keep any other foodstuffs from falling out and put its handle in front of the woman to give her something to lean on. Then I retrieved a white plastic bag that had expelled all of its contents except one box of spaghetti.
“Do you still want everything?” I said, looking at the produce on the ground.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Whatever we don’t peel, we can wash.”
I gathered every foodstuff I could find, even the orange in the gutter, its leathery skin covered in dust. I wiped it off on the front of my jeans before dropping it in the plastic bag.
Soon, only the broken jar was left. I picked the bigger fragments out of the sweet-and-sour sauce, stacked them curved-side down in the palm of my left hand, and dropped them in the trashcan on the corner. Wiping my hands on the tail of my t-shirt, I returned to the woman, who was still standing where I’d left her. She was steady on her feet, but she did not seem ready to start walking again. She leaned on the cart, taking deep breaths.
“Okay,” she said. But she didn’t make a move.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
With what appeared to be great effort, the woman raised her age-spotted hand off the cart’s handle and pointed up the street. “Just around the corner.”
“Okay.” I waggled. “Would it be all right if I walked with you? I could push the cart, if you like.”
She nodded. I took the cart handle, and she tucked her right hand into the crook of my left elbow.
To walk at the woman’s pace, I moved in a kind of slow motion, rolling each step heel to toe over several seconds. I guessed it took two minutes for us to pass the tavern and reach the corner. In the presence of the elderly stranger, I felt different than I had just minutes before—not better, necessarily, but different. I had been living in my head, with no outside conversation, for almost a week, and until this woman put her hand on my arm to steady herself, I had not been touched by anyone since shaking hands with Elaine at the end of our meeting.
“This way,” the woman said, giving my arm a weak tug.
We walked west on Huron Street, into the sun, which still hung above the residential towers at the end of the block. I lowered my eyes to the sidewalk, watching the woman’s steps, matching mine to hers as best I could.
“You know,” she said, “your replacement wasn’t very good.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. My replacement?
I’d begun to worry that the heat and stress of her outing had made her delirious when another explanation dawned on me: she’d recognized me from St. Asella’s, and my “replacement” was whoever they’d found to lector at the noon mass two days before.
I let the remark pass without comment, hoping to end an uncomfortable line of conversation.
“I asked Catherine where you were,” she said, “but she didn’t know.”
Did anyone at St. Asella’s, I wondered, experience even a moment’s confusion without looking to Catherine for clarity?
Holding up my end of the conversation seemed to offer the best chance of ending it quickly. I waggled and said, “There was an illness in my family.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “I’m sorry to hear it. Anyone you’d like me to pray for?”
Answering “yes” would have required me to flesh out my lie with additional detail, and the thought of this woman praying for my false intention made me grimace.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “But my mother isn’t sick anymore.”
“Oh, good,” the woman said. “Thank God for that.”
We passed a gated parking lot bordered by a tall, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. As we approached a restaurant just west of the parking lot, patrons enjoying an early dinner in sidewalk seating glanced up at us. A couple of women older than me, but much younger than the woman on my arm—women about Catherine’s age—stared and smiled at what must have looked to them like a Norman Rockwell tableau come to life. Without deciding to, I smiled in the chaste, unthreatening way I imagin
ed a young man in such a scene would smile.
We walked into the shade of an arched green awning, its white-trimmed fringe rippling in the wind, and the woman came to a stop.
“Here we are,” she said.
The doorman got out from behind his desk and opened the door.
“I was wondering when you’d be back,” he said to her, smiling.
“I made it,” she said.
“Yes, you did.” He reached for the cart handle. “Thank you, sir, I’ll take this from you.”
“Sure,” I said.
The doorman was twice as broad as me at the shoulders. His voice alone, a booming bass, was overpowering.
“I’ll bring the groceries to your door, Mrs. Landry,” he said. “Then I’ll be back for you.”
“Thank you, Thomas,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
Thomas wheeled the cart inside. Bearing the weight of the cart and its contents with just two fingers, he walked up four steps and disappeared down a hallway.
“Thank you, too,” the woman—Mrs. Landry—said to me.
“It was no trouble.”
We stood stock-still under the awning, my hands folded in front of me and one of hers still clinging to my arm.
“Will you be reading on Sunday?”
Mrs. Landry raised her eyes to meet mine. The strain made her neck and head tremble.
“We need you now more than ever.”
All other things being equal, I would have gone back to lectoring at St. Asella’s just because Mrs. Landry wanted me to. I would have stood in front of everyone and read for her alone. And at the words “we need you” I felt a flicker of excitement at the possibility of returning some sense of purpose to my days. But it would be weeks before I understood what Mrs. Landry meant when she said that I was needed now more than ever. I didn’t ask her to explain, because no explanation would have changed my mind. I’d decided that returning to St. Asella’s was tantamount to acknowledging that I was the misfit Catherine believed me to be. Under those circumstances, I was never going back to that church. And I didn’t have the heart to lie to Mrs. Landry again.
