Agatha of Little Neon

by Claire Luchette

Dread and panic swept across Lawnmower Jill’s face. She shook her head, but we nodded back. She said, “No, no, no,” and we said, “You must, you must, you must.”

  We said, “The hospital’s just three miles down the road.”

  She said, “Sisters, that’s way too fucking far.”

  We said, “Just take it one inch at a time.”

  Something shifted within her, as if a seam were pulled taut. She released a breath and a final curse, and then took hold of Mickey and started her engine.

  We could see that this didn’t thrill Mickey—she issued a curse of her own—but surely she would soon find reason to smile. And oh, the stories she would tell her little baby about this day. How lucky, how blessed she was, that Lawnmower Jill had come along.

  We stood back and watched them tut down the sidewalk. The mower sent out clumps of thick exhaust and, as it went forward, pushed through the soft snow where no one had yet walked, leaving behind thick tracks in the blank belt of sidewalk frost.

  For the rest of the night, many hours after the store was scheduled to close, we stayed behind the counter under the bright lights of the Tedeschi, eyeing and pleading to the little blue-faced Mary atop the register. Horse was asleep in the corner, and every ten minutes we would lift the receiver from the phone on the wall and call the birth ward and ask to speak to Lawnmower Jill. “Any news?” we’d ask, and Lawnmower Jill told us there wasn’t any news, until there was—Mickey birthed a boy, Lawnmower Jill said, a loud, gooey thing they wrapped up and gave a little hat.

  We shook Horse awake to tell her the news and left her belly-up and drooling in the unlocked store, and in our glee we walked home, side by side, gloved hand in gloved hand, four across. We kicked into the gathered snow, which glittered in the moonlight. We had the keen feeling that everyone, at that moment, was safe, even the rodents, nestled underground, and though it wasn’t the case, we had no reason to believe we would ever suffer again. It’s easy to be fooled by joy, to think it will never abandon you, never leave room for hunger and fear.

  Under the highway overpass, we shrieked to hear the echo, and we waited until the last memory of our voices had died. And then we turned the corner and arrived at our little street.

  If I had a pulpit, I would preach about driveways. Our short black link to the unknown, our supremacy over the grass. We think we’ve memorized their every inch—the fist-big crack, the belt of tough tar, the place where the lawn begins.

  But imagine my surprise, I’d tell my disciples. Imagine my shock when we plodded up to our house and found the thick tracks of the mower’s wheels pressed in the sidewalk snow. Imagine how stunned and small we felt when we saw that all the snow in our driveway had been cleared away. A million flakes, lifted and thrown by the shovelful, so our walk to the door was made easier, so we could see, through the sparkling rime, all the dark pavement beneath.

  61.

  Here’s what I remember of Christmas: a week before, we sent cards to Mother Roberta, our families, Father Steve and Deacon Greg, the pope. From the garage, Tim Gary dragged in the plastic tree that Little Neon kept decorated all year, covered with a bedsheet to keep off dust. Christmas Eve, Mary Lucille sliced her thumb cutting onions. The lasagna was too salty. The ice cream was peppermint.

  After dinner, we gathered around the speakerphone to call Mother Roberta. She told us that in Buffalo, the bishop had announced more cutbacks. Elementary schools would close, parishes would be consolidated, and more sisters like us would be sent away. At least seventeen sisters had been invited to retire early and would soon move into the home where she lived.

  Not a very good plan, in Mother Roberta’s opinion. Not her idea of a long-term solution. “It’s ugly, the way they’re handling things. Claptrap. What the diocese needs to do,” she said, “is file for bankruptcy.” She hacked something up from her throat. “If I were in charge—” But she didn’t finish the sentence.

  62.

  January I was back to school, in thick tights and heavy sweaters.

  Here’s a little word for an overwhelming concept: pi. The time had come for me to teach it. There are many ways to talk about pi; I chose to list adjectives. Pi is irrational. Transcendental. A mathematical constant.

  They had a hard time with it. One girl wanted to know how pi could have an infinite number of decimal places. She asked, “What does it mean, exactly, for the digits to go on and on forever?”

  Forever—I’d forgotten how stressful a concept it can be.

  I told the girls everything I’d read: Pi is a perfect idea but not a perfect number. You could list digits of pi for the rest of your life and still have failed to calculate most of it, because its digits went on and on, forever, without end. The more computing mathematicians did, the more digits they were able to list, the closer they got to perfect, I said. But they’d never finish.

  Samantha asked me, “But what’s the point? They’ll never figure out the whole thing, so what’s the point?”

  I told her looking for the point ruins the fun. “Cultivate your ability to forget about the point,” I said. I tried to explain that work could keep a woman upright, so long as she didn’t look for the point. The slow unfolding of progress—this was enough. Work begetting more work.

  Infinity, I told the girls, is a state of boundlessness, which is both terrifying and full of hope. “Just like God,” I said. The girls blinked. They did not write this down.

  “Maybe,” I said, “we don’t have the right words to talk about these things. I can tell you what infinity is like, but I’d be using my own words. And I only have so many words, not an endless number, an infinite number of words.”

  I could see I was losing them.

  “But anyway,” I said. “Pi. Let’s look at how it begins. And how we can use it.”

  I erased the board very slowly, then erased it again. This bought me some time to myself.

  63.

  February: the deep, bleak void of the year. We were familiar with its mercilessness. Lackawanna Februarys had been devoid of wonder and ease, and the same was true in Woonsocket. We relinquished joy. We barely spoke. We did not smile. Not once did we clean the toilet on the second floor.

  The fates of our houseplants were not ours to determine; our pothos atrophied and our hardy mums shrank. When we watered them, the water froze in the dirt.

  So we gave in. We sealed the windows of every room with gray felt. The four of us pushed our beds together to sleep close, under blankets that plugged into the wall. We spent whole evenings sitting on the kitchen floor before an open oven with Baby and Tim Gary and Pete and Eileen, playing cards, or doing nothing except waiting to be warm again.

  * * *

  Valentine’s Day, Pete went to Cranston to sit with his daughter and a supervisor in a room with windows for walls. He told us he brought his daughter chocolates. He’d made her a card, too, and included lines from an Anne Sexton poem: “a small milky mouse / of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house / of herself.” The girl read the card and looked over the box, then informed him she was allergic to nuts.

  “What’d you do with the chocolates?” Mary Lucille asked.

  “They’re on the counter,” he said.

  “I’m sure she appreciated the card,” I said.

  Pete shrugged. “Her mom got her a five-pound gummy bear,” he said, “which is equal to fourteen hundred regularly sized gummy bears.”

  “But how do you eat it?” Mary Lucille asked. “With a fork and knife?”

  Pete shrugged.

  After a moment, Baby: “Anyone want to go to a meeting?”

  Pete nodded and said that was a good idea. Eileen said yeah. Tim Gary shrugged and said why not.

  “There’s one at the community center on South Main; starts in twenty minutes,” Baby said. Then he looked at the four of us. “It’s cold—can we get a ride?”

  So everyone put their dishes in the sink and piled into the white van. The streets were slick, so Therese drove slowly, hunched up at
the wheel. When we pulled up outside the building, everyone piled out, and Baby shut the van door.

  “Should we go in, too?” Mary Lucille asked.

  “No way,” Therese said. “It’s private.”

  “Well, we can’t wait in the car,” Mary Lucille said. “We’ll freeze.”

  “We can keep it running,” Therese said.

  “That’s wasteful,” I said.

  “We’ll go home and come back,” Frances said.

  Therese shook her head. “We’ll have to turn right around by the time we get home.”

  Mary Lucille rolled down her window. “Baby!” she yelled. He turned. “We should go home, right? And come back?” Baby nodded as if it was obvious. Then he disappeared inside.

  64.

  Where we lived, there was a fox. A sleek, gorgeous thing with a tiny face, upright ears, quick legs. It did not hibernate; foxes don’t. It spent all winter aboveground. From the sofa, drinking coffee, we liked to watch it slink through the snow in Little Neon’s yard each dawn. It looked scrawny. It made me think of Mother Roberta’s turkey: it’s possible there was a whole group of foxes, a whole skulk, but we never saw more than a single fox at a time, strutting on its own, and so we chose to believe there was only the one lone brave fox. Mary Lucille left it cans of hot dogs behind the oak tree.

  On Ash Wednesday we woke at dawn to be blessed by Father Steve at the parish. In February, dressing was an act of assuming more and more space: thermals, sweaters, fleeces, parkas zipped to our chins. We drank coffee in fast slurps, and then laced our boots and crammed our hands into mittens only after we’d fastened and tucked ourselves away and locked the door.

  On our way to church, Mary Lucille stooped to set an open can of hot dogs in the snow. Ash Wednesday was the last time she made an offering, because Tim Gary found the Ash Wednesday hot dogs.

  He confronted us, and when we explained what the hot dogs were for, he fumed. What were we thinking? How could we lure such an unkind creature—a predator—to our yard?

  We were sorry, Therese told him. “We were only trying—”

  “Go to the store and buy a raw chicken.”

  Frances was quick to say we would. We walked to the Price Rite and bought the biggest chicken we could find. Seven pounds, wrapped airtight, cold and dense.

  When we presented it to Tim Gary, he did not thank us. He didn’t say anything at all. He was in the yard, whistling a tune we didn’t know—something slow and melodic. He ripped the plastic free. The chicken was luminous, like a big, misshapen pearl. Tim Gary, still whistling, chucked the wet meat into the back of a metal box trap, no bigger than a Weber grill. He set the trap next to a bush, and then he went inside to wait.

  * * *

  Hours passed; evening gave way to night. Pete asked Tim Gary what he was going to do once he’d trapped the fox, and Tim Gary said, “You’ll see.”

  After curfew, in the attic, we unfastened our habits and freed our feet from our pantyhose and hung up our veils. Outside there was clatter, and we went to the window to see Tim Gary on the grass, laughing and clapping his hands. That’s when we saw the fox, trapped in the cage with the gleaming chicken. Tim Gary knelt in the snow to mock the fox, jeering in a nasty way, and we thought for a second that the fox might attack him through the bars of the cage, but then Tim Gary stood and carried the trap around to the garage, where we could no longer see, but we heard the groan of the garage door as Tim Gary made it rise and fall, locking us in the same house as the fox.

  Panicked, we ran down in our nightclothes and bare feet. We expected to find gnashing jaws and wild eyes, but the fox looked shrunken and weak in its cage.

  Tim Gary turned on the garage sink and pulled the nozzle so the water ran into an empty trash can. The hose twitched as the water came rushing. He let it run until the trash can was full.

  Mary Lucille asked, horrified, “What are you doing?”

  Therese said, “Tim Gary, it’s past curfew!”

  He didn’t answer. He offered no explanation, no confession, no plea or defense. He only picked up the cage, and the fox trembled in the air. We watched the animal shake and seize.

  “Stop it!” Frances yelled, but then all at once Tim Gary plunged the cage into the trash can. Water went flying, but there was enough left to engulf the fox until its trembling stopped.

  Tim Gary breathed hard and turned off the sink. His gloves and the sleeves of his flannel were sopping, and he was red in the face.

  “What is the matter with you?” Therese yelled. “That was—so—so—”

  “Cruel!” Frances said.

  “Oh, the poor fox,” Mary Lucille said, and I saw that she was crying. “One of God’s creatures!”

  “Tim Gary,” I said. “Wasn’t there another way?”

  “Had to happen,” he said, and we repeated these words to ourselves later, after he’d disposed of the carcass, after he’d scrubbed his hands with steel wool until they were pink and raw.

  We locked ourselves in the attic and for a while sat stunned and afraid. We acknowledged aloud to each other that Tim Gary did not seem okay.

  “I saw him looking in the personal ads the other day,” Therese said, her hands folded on her lap. “He had a pen in his hand, but he didn’t lift it once.”

  “The personal ads are on the same page as the crossword,” I said, impatient. “He was probably just doing the crossword.”

  “I think it’s SAD—seasonal affective disorder. He’s depressed because he doesn’t get enough vitamin D,” Frances said. “The socks he was wearing today, he’s worn every day this week. The same pair.”

  “Last Tuesday I saw him eating pudding with the lights off,” Mary Lucille said, leaning forward to whisper. “It was nine-thirty at night. I turned the kitchen lights on and he said, ‘I don’t want them on.’” She made her can-you-imagine face.

  I recognized this side of them. In Lackawanna they were always jockeying to be the most loving woman at the day care, the one the babies liked best. Here they were, lobbing their theories, casually competing to see who had the most insight, who had been watching Tim Gary most closely. They each wanted to be his earthly savior, and it seemed as if it wasn’t for Tim Gary’s sake, but for their own, because they liked the way it made them look.

  65.

  Things turned, or seemed to, when winter gave way to warmer weather. The stupid snow melted quickly and left everything muddy and soft.

  The first Saturday in March, Baby and Eileen both passed the GED. Mary Lucille made brownies. “I undercooked them,” she said, proud, “so they’re still like fudge inside.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Baby said. “Something like eighty percent of people pass.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Eileen said. “I barely passed.”

  “Passing is passing,” Baby said. He was going to apply to new jobs, he said. Finally leave the ice factory behind.

  I wanted to make changes, too. For Lent, the season of sacrifice, I made a list of things not to do less often, but to do more. I wanted to fit in two additional rosaries a day, start taking multivitamins, and help Tim Gary. Give him a way to shore himself up.

  Mother Roberta used to say all a person needed was somewhere to go and something to do. From the kitchen window I studied the abandoned apiary in the backyard. Maybe Tim Gary needed to have bees again.

  And so one weekend I sat in front of the St. Gertrude’s computer and found the rudimentary website of a man in Hopedale, only twelve miles north of Woonsocket. He bred honeybees and sold them in boxes of twelve thousand.

  I dialed his number. When the apiarist answered, he sounded impatient, as if he’d been pulled from pleasure by the ring of the phone.

  I told him I was a customer intending to buy bees. I was interested, I said, in the Carniolans—tough, resistant to mites. “But I have a quick question. How do I get the bees out of the box without getting stung?”

  He explained that all I’d need to do is throw the box on the ground, wiggle f
ree the lid, and pour out the bees. They’d spill from the box, he said, like oil. They wouldn’t hurt me. They were merciful creatures. They’d find the apiary on their own.

  “And they’re safe to transport in a box, in the back of a van?”

  Yes, of course. He regularly drove around with a carful of bees.

  After I thanked him for his time and he said goodbye, his phone hovered in its receiver, and I could hear him whispering tender words he thought no one else could hear: “Oh, darling. You can have my waffles. Yeah. You like that?” By the time I rushed to hang up, I was all red with the hot shame of happening, uninvited, upon an intimacy not my own.

  I counted my allowance and came up with enough for four pounds of bees. I wanted it to be a surprise for Tim Gary. But when I went to ask Therese for the keys to the bus, she was sitting with him in the kitchen. She gave me the key and asked, “Where are you going?”

  I hesitated. I said, “I have to run an errand.”

  On her face I saw something distrustful. She asked me to pick up skim milk.

  * * *

  The parish printer was out of ink, so I’d written the directions on both sides of a napkin. I took the turnpike out of town, and the van lurched and pitched as I charged into Massachusetts. I ate graham crackers straight from the sleeve. Mine was the only vehicle on the road, and there were no houses, just blank pasture, until I turned off the paved street and onto a long driveway of gravel and dust.

  I thought, at first, that I’d arrived at the wrong house—I saw no beehives in the yard, no man traipsing around in a white suit. Just the low, wide house of clapboard siding, the windows covered with sun-leeched sheets of newspaper. An awfully dark place to be breeding bees, I thought. I checked the house number against what I’d written down, then turned off the ignition.

  The apiarist had bushes of raspberries near the road, the fruit gone squat and hard. The grass was frosted with dandelion heads; I bent to stroke it. In the treeless yard, a low plastic pool with dregs of rotten leaves, and on the porch a paint-stripped bike thrown on its side.