Agatha of Little Neon

by Claire Luchette

  This noisy world of rent payments and polka-dot skirts and restaurant reservations—I’d thought, years ago, that I was leaving this world for good. I had not expected I’d return.

  84.

  My new life brought me many firsts. I slept past twelve for the first time since I was young. I bought my first cellular phone, sent my first text message. My first time at Target: I couldn’t stop finding things to admire. Glass bowls and baby clothes and tall bottles of shampoo. I bought my first portable CD player, my first CD—a band called Rilo Kiley whose album cover I liked. I bought my first pair of patent leather loafers. One Saturday, my brother made me my first gin martini, briny and cold and sharp.

  Every so often my brother or Jules would ask me, not without trepidation, some question about my life before: Do you miss your routine? Were you allowed to watch television? Did you ever go bowling? Was it awful, having to wake up so early every day?

  What I could never say aloud was this: that life solved so many things. I was able to postpone all my questions and inclinations. I’d solved myself for a while.

  85.

  I enrolled in community college. I registered for classes in sociology, calculus, French. A city bus took me to another city bus that took me right to the campus. The second bus went past the road that led to Lackawanna, and it was a relief every time the driver did not turn that way.

  The French teacher was named Clarisse Patrice, which rhymed, and though I called her “Madame” to her face, I liked to say her whole name to myself. “Cluh reese puh treese.” She was beautiful and young and had a blunt bob haircut. In class we learned different verb tenses, and she asked us to write about something we used to do but did not do anymore, using l’imparfait.

  The prompt unmoored me. I stared at the chalkboard until Clarisse Patrice knelt next to me and asked if I had any questions. Did I understand the imperfect tense? I nodded. From where I sat it seemed my whole life was something I used to do but did not do anymore.

  86.

  I still believe that everything I have, every last butter bean and incomplete thought, is one of many ordinary blessings, something I do not deserve. I have been trying to understand what it means, to deserve. Duh serve. Dee sir vuh. I can’t work out the logic of it: why I should still have what I do, when all I did was give up.

  One day dovetails into the next. Some nights I am able to absolve myself. I am keen to get on with my life, and get closer to becoming someone else.

  * * *

  I had to write to the pope again, before I left. Nothing would be official without the Vatican’s permission, Abbess Paracleta said, but she’d never seen a request denied. I met with her on a beautiful day soon after Tim Gary’s funeral, before the school year was up, and through tears I told her I was ready. “And you’ve prayed about this?” she asked. I nodded. “And you know this won’t fix anything?” I nodded again.

  She had me sign a number of blank forms, all of them copies of copies of typewritten copies, the text blurry.

  In my letter, I asked the pope if he remembered anything about geometry. Flip through a geometry textbook, I wrote, and you’ll find lists and lists of theorems, all with diagrams for proof of the reasoning. Rock-solid logic. When I first started teaching, I told him, I looked and looked for a theorem that had been updated since the days of Plato and Euclid. I wanted to find reason to believe that the truth was amendable, that the best way to do something wasn’t necessarily the way it’s always done. Even when I reached the end, I went back and looked again, in case I’d missed what I was hoping for. But no: we were still using the same stuff Euclid came up with. None of the rules had changed.

  It had always been the case, I told the pope, that we women were lackeys. But there was no proof or reasoning, no labeled diagram, no airtight logic to help me understand.

  I signed my birth name. Abbess Paracleta told me the Holy See was very slow in confirming permission to leave. “This might take months,” she said, “to be official. But you can leave now.”

  She told me not to tell the others; she would tell them herself. It would endanger their vocations, she said, if they knew my reasons.

  I stood and shook her hand, and I thanked her, though I wasn’t sure what for.

  * * *

  When I told the principal I was going away and wouldn’t be coming back, he asked me if I had any idea how much trouble I was making. He’d have to find a long-term substitute, someone who knew math. And then start the hiring process again. Did I realize just how difficult I’d made things?

  Of course, I said. Of course I do.

  It was the end of the school day. The hallways were quiet and still. I closed a locker someone had forgotten to shut. In the faculty lounge I washed the coffeepot, then wet a rag and cleaned out the microwave. Things had exploded and overflowed—months’ worth of slop—and no one had bothered to wipe up the mess. It didn’t seem like such a hard thing to do, but only once I’d done it.

  * * *

  Nadia wasn’t in her classroom. I thought maybe she’d already left, but her Jeep was still in the lot.

  I found her in the darkroom. I knocked, and she opened the door and let me in, then shut it quickly behind me. Under the amber light, she looked drowsy and flushed. The air smelled like vinegar. The space was cramped, and I was careful not to turn or touch anything.

  I asked Nadia about the film she was developing, and she said she’d photographed everything she’d thrown away in the past week. I watched her poke a print in a pan of fluid.

  After a moment I told her I had to say goodbye.

  “No, stick around,” she said. “I’m almost done. Let’s get milkshakes.”

  I stuck around. I waited until she’d hung the dripping sheet—the image was a toothbrush with ragged bristles—and we walked to the creamery. We ordered cookies-and-cream milkshakes and sat across from each other at a picnic table, and she started talking about a babysitter she’d had when she was young, a woman named Momo who’d made her pick up centipedes from the basement floor.

  “Gross,” I said. And before she could say anything else about Momo, I told her I was leaving. “The church. And the school. And Rhode Island.”

  She nodded. She didn’t ask why. She said, “Wow,” and looked into her milkshake, and then I made her promise to watch out for Samantha.

  “I will,” she said.

  She looked at me with what I would later be sure was love.

  My sisters never knew I had a friend named Nadia, or that we’d become close. All they knew was that I went to school and, hours later, came home again. I never mentioned her—not because she didn’t matter, but because she did. Nadia was a marvel all my own.

  When we finished our shakes, I walked her to her car. She hugged me. She kissed my cheek. And then she got into the driver’s seat and shut the door. I stood there as the lights of her Jeep came on, and when she drove away I watched the rear window get smaller and smaller, until she turned a corner, and she was gone.

  * * *

  Four days passed. Every meal was significant to me, and every conversation with my sisters seemed a lie, a trial of withholding.

  During my last dinner in Little Neon, Mary Lucille said maybe the next day we could grill corn, and I smiled. I nodded. I said, “Corn sounds nice.” And then Abbess Paracleta drove me to the bus station in the middle of the night.

  87.

  I asked Abbess Paracleta to ship me a box of things I’d left behind—my lesson plans, my long johns, my parka.

  I didn’t expect a note or card, but I still looked for one. Nothing. The first-class postage was $21.17, and I mailed her back a check, as I’d promised on the phone. “Thank you so much,” I wrote on a notecard, then my lapse into propriety embarrassed me, so I ripped it up and sent just the check.

  My sisters were still in Little Neon. I could have called the house phone, but I never had the courage. They were waiting for another reassignment. The abbess wanted to hire someone who had experience, and they wanted
to be somewhere they could be of better use.

  Sometimes I allow myself to think back to our first night together, lifetimes ago. We were novices, barely passing for women before we tried to pass as women religious. We’d met at the dinner table, smiled too much. Passed the potatoes. Kept secret our anxieties. Then, in the dark, we learned the sounds of each other’s sleep.

  Other times, I think of the years to come, how the three of them will grow old together, will watch a hundred winters give way to a hundred springs, will pluck a thousand hairs from each other’s chins. And there will be a million mornings they set the table for three and sit down together, and after a while it won’t occur to them to miss me.

  88.

  I saw them, months later, when Mother Roberta died. She died during a snowstorm in the coldest November Lackawanna had ever seen. Abbess Paracleta told me over the phone that she got pneumonia, and then her organs shut down one by one. It was quick, she said, and Mother Roberta felt little pain.

  I don’t know how she found my brother’s number. I sat for some time after she said goodbye, holding the receiver to my ear. I felt hollow, emptied out. I listened to the steady hum of the dial tone—the line was free and ready; I could dial anyone I wanted, someone who’d answer the phone even if their hands were full when it rang. I wanted to call the kind of friend who’d let me sob with impunity for a while, but no one came to mind.

  * * *

  That week, I took a bus to Lackawanna and stood in the basilica while Mother Roberta was wheeled up and down the aisle one last time—not in her chair, this time, but in a casket.

  The marble floor of the church was slick and gray with tracked-in snow. There were bagpipes lamenting, a child’s shriek.

  Standing in the back, I was one of the last to receive Communion, to kneel and say goodbye. At the casket, I saw that the undertaker had administered a thick coat of makeup a shade too orange. But I could still see three wiry hairs on Mother Roberta’s powdered chin. I leaned close and touched each of them. Her face looked proud, stoic, her eyelids shut to the beautiful dome.

  There it was above me: the only untouched thing. Everything else in Lackawanna had changed, had left or died or rotted, except that blessed ceiling. As I walked to my seat, I craned my neck to look.

  The mural of Mary and the angels, heavenbound—before, it had always brought me hope. But it devastated me then. I knew it was supposed to be a joyous moment for Mary, but I fixated on the details of life on earth, the palm tree behind Luke. There was a cost to salvation, I understood. I’d never considered how unbearably sad it was to have to leave so much behind.

  In the pew I lowered my head and tried to pray. I didn’t want to look anymore at all that great, unimaginable glory, by human minds imagined.

  * * *

  After Mother Roberta’s casket was wheeled out of the church, Father Thaddeus and the altar boys processed back down the aisle. He would stay in Lackawanna another year, and then he’d move to Arizona. I would think of this image of him, at the front of the procession, head thrown back in pride, when, years later, I read that Buffalo priests were among the many who’d made victims of God-fearing kids.

  When the procession ended I stood and slipped my arms into my parka sleeves, bent my head to try to mash together the zipper. There was to be a prayer at the gravesite, and then the parish had planned a luncheon, but I couldn’t find the courage. I wanted to flee back to my brother’s.

  Maybe it was silly to think I could escape seeing them. During the service they’d sat up front, second pew, and from way back in the church they seemed as close to each other as ever. I’d watched them with something like contempt: the way Mary Lucille touched Frances’s back, how Frances brought her mouth close to Therese’s ear. Whispering a consolation, maybe.

  The teeth of my zipper would not catch, and I looked up to see the three of them coming toward me in lockstep.

  I dropped the ends of the zipper and raised my eyes to face them.

  Then they were there, so close I could see the dandruff on Therese’s shoulders. I raised my hand to wave, and I cleared my throat to speak, but the three of them didn’t see me. They were looking elsewhere. They moved past me by the time I took a breath.

  89.

  On the bus I sat across from a woman who looked like someone I could be friends with. She wore sensible shoes and read a novel and ate a candy bar. I smiled at her, hoping she might look up and smile back, but she didn’t. At the next stop, I looked and waited for her to see me, but she continued to read. I did this again and again. Finally, she pulled the rope and stood to exit through the rear door. She walked in the direction of wherever she was going, and even when the bus went past her, I looked out the window and tried to catch her eye, and I suppose this is all I ever do: hope that despite all precedent, what I most want to happen will happen, come about and delight me.

  Well. Despite all precedent, the woman did look up. She saw my face in the window. And I smiled at her, and she smiled back.

  90.

  “Pray,” Mother Roberta had instructed me, before I left the order. One afternoon near the end, I’d called her crying. It was the first time I’d said aloud that I wanted to go. We talked only six minutes, and when I hung up, I realized I’d forgotten to ask what to pray for. But I suspect she meant forgiveness.

  After her funeral, back at my brother’s, I knelt sweating in front of the box fan and watched it make the curtains bloat. The blades spun at a speed I could only guess at, so fast I had no way of telling one blade from the next. On my knees, I went back in my mind to the turbines, the night Tim Gary and I sat up high on the water tower and strained our eyes to see the moonlit vanes, the red lights that blinked in the dark. Each time I revisit the memory, I imagine the turbines might take flight, lift up, go somewhere new. But then I remember that’s not how they work.

  It was late, and my knees hurt, but I stayed there at the window, and the blades of the fan cut the air and pushed it in my face. I shut my eyes and tried to summon the words. My God, I tried. Dear God. Oh, my God.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Early drafts of this book were written when I lived nowhere, and I’m indebted to the institutions that gave me the great gifts of space and time: the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, Blue Mountain Center, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Thank you to Julie Barer and Nicole Cunningham for their brilliance and conviction, and to Jenna Johnson, whose editorial acuity was invaluable. To Gretchen Achilles, Janine Barlow, June Park, Lauren Roberts, Lydia Zoells, and the entire tireless team at FSG. To Sister Sharon Erickson, for her generous insights about the lives of women religious, and to Sister Miriam Ruth Ryan. To the literary journals that published early excerpts, in different forms: Ploughshares, Granta, Iowa Review. At John Carroll University, thanks to George Bilgere, Anna Hocevar, Phil Metres, and Debby Rosenthal. At the University of Oregon, Jason Brown and Karen Thompson Walker. To Marjorie Celona, who provided a million varieties of support—a real superfluity. To the friends who read drafts of this book, and who have abided many hairstyles and yelled at me to bring a coat: Nicky Gonzalez, Ashley Hefnawy, Cristina Henríquez, Jim Kaberna, Ndinda Kioko, Jen Lewis, Quinn Lewis, Kate Nemetz, Asha Saluja, Alex Tanner, Leah Velez, Natalie Villacorta. To my family for your love and laughter and support: Barb, Fred, Richard, Matt, Kate, and my grandparents. Finally, to Dotun Akintoye, the brightest light, the best kind of whoa.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Claire Luchette has published work in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Granta. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Luchette graduated from the University of Oregon MFA program and has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House. Agatha of Little Neon is Luchette’s first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Co
pyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I. Poverty

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part II. Chastity

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45