Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  At the yard sale, I did not want to imagine how desperately alone I’d feel when my parents passed away, and nearly ran from that colonial furniture and up the stairs to the second floor, where, in a small bedroom on a nightstand next to a single bed, the Virgin Mary took my breath away. She was in a framed postcard as Our Lady of Fatima, dressed in a white luminescent gown, floating peacefully in a powdery gray, star-twinkled sky. Glitter graced her veil, and a single white rose sat on each foot as three little kids in babushkas knelt on a grassy hill, looking adoringly up at her, and I was struck by a powerful urge—the same feeling I get when I’m handed a furry kitten or an adorable baby: I just wanted to eat her up. Another shopper walked in and I grabbed that picture so fast you’d have thought I was a starving street dog who’d just been thrown a T-bone steak.

  I hung that little picture in my bedroom next to the light switch; and the next Mary—a crosscut of a tree on which Mary in a varnished print looks concerned for you as she points to her own stabbed heart—I hung next to the mirror in the bathroom. A Rubenesque Mary looking knowingly at a chubby baby Jesus on her lap found a place above my bed.

  I did feel love for Mary every time I looked at the paintings I’d begun to collect, but I was in love with my other yard-sale paintings, too. I had no idea that before long the Blessed Mother would multiply all over my house like Richard Dreyfuss’s little mud mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  But I get ahead of myself. As that little Mary postcard entered my house that first spring in Orient, Mary planted one little hook in my heart that let in one little ray of light, and Nancy Sawastynowicz, my new best friend, came in.

  I’d seen a big blond woman with braids, digging across the road that spring; then, a few days after I found my first Mary, on my way home from buying coffee around the corner at the general store, the woman stabbed her spade in the earth, stood, and offered her hand. “I’m Nancy Sawastynowicz McCarthy,” she said. “That’s my son, Seth.” She indicated a little boy on a tricycle down the road. “I had him late in life. I’m forty-one. I’m never having another.” Her eyes sparked and I thought she might be looking for a joke, but I was still depressed and not in the mood.

  I did, however, notice the coincidence. Nancy and I had both said, “I’m never having another,” even though we’d had kids at the opposite ends of our lives. But I was still feeling separate and looking for differences, not similarities. I smiled and excused myself.

  But blessings can be as persistent as curses, and Nancy refused to be discouraged. She knocked at my door later in the day, carrying a shovel and a shoebox. “I brought you some flowers from my mother’s yard. You could plant them out back.”

  “They’ll probably die.”

  “Nah. All they need’s water and food.”

  She carried them through my kitchen and out the back door, so I followed her. “You got a spade?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s okay.” She stabbed her shovel into the ground near the back fence. “I got an extra. You could have it.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” She pulled two baby plants, joined at their roots, apart. “These are sweet williams. They’ll do good here. Look, you got evening primrose coming up.” She brushed some leaves away and I could see pale green shoots poking through the earth. I ran my hand over the little nubs. Had they been growing all through the winter in the dark and the cold? Nancy brushed away more leaves and began yanking out clumps of dead stalks. I’d had unremarkable vegetable gardens a few times, but I’d never grown flowers and wasn’t sure I wanted to start. But I knelt beside Nancy and yanked too. Then, as she patted the sweet williams in the ground and watered them in, she said, “Did you read all those books I saw you carrying when you moved in?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I should have helped you.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause you needed it? I’m a DP—dumb Polack. I stayed back in the third grade. I can’t spell.”

  “Spelling’s overrated.” I remembered from our earlier conversation that Nancy was a year older than I. Because she’d stayed back we probably had graduated high school in the same year. “I graduated in ’68, too.”

  “Queen of the Prom.” She jabbed her thumb at her chest.

  “The Girl Who Got Pregnant.” I jabbed my thumb at mine.

  She howled. “You want a margarita?”

  Nancy stopped by every day just to check in. If my dishes were dirty, she did them. She swept the floor; she watered my plants. “Sit down,” I’d say. “I don’t want to,” she’d say back.

  We made dump runs together, waded into the bay to clam, and rowed a boat out to scallop. We pedaled on our bikes by the light of the moon, through bulrushes rustling by our ears, past newly plowed fields that smelled of damp earth, by choppy inlets we could hear lapping in the distance. When the moon was full, we pedaled harder, and Nancy repeated every few minutes, “I’m mooning, man.” Back home we were too stirred up to sleep, so we sipped tea in my kitchen and told stories. Nancy had played piano and guitar when she was younger and told me how she used to perform at teen mass. “It was All Saints’ Day; I play ‘When the Saints Come Marching In,’ and they kick me out. It was All Saints’ Day! The morons. I never went back, not even when my cousin Sissy got married; I stood outside the door.”

  The sky that winter could be overcast for weeks, allowing not even a glimpse of the moon; but Nancy and I could tell when the moon was waxing or waning by the tone of our moods. The sea, the moon, the earth are all feminine, and perhaps because you couldn’t walk from your house to your car without smelling or feeling them, there was a tradition of powerful women in Orient. When whale oil still lit the lamps of the world, the men left for long, two-year stretches to hunt the seas for whales. The women worked the land; they grew the food, raised the children, chopped the wood to heat their houses. I had heard rumors that there was a coven of witches in Orient, which I tended not to believe, especially once I heard the same rumor about Nancy and me. I knew for certain, though, that there was an enclave of lesbians. Half of the land was still farmed in Orient, and from the time the asparagus appeared early in the spring till the pumpkins and squash came late in the fall, stands dotted the roads “manned” by women. In this woman-dominated world, the very air I breathed made me feel planted, grounded, rooted, sane.

  While my house continued to fill with Marys (on a felt banner as the Virgin of Guadalupe, she stood at the top of the stairs; in a small bedroom I planned to turn into my shrine room, she was a regal queen wearing a jeweled crown, with all of humanity nestled in her cape), I went outside my third spring in Orient and started to dig. I dug a garden along the back fence and a plot twenty feet by six in the lawn. I pulled onion grass for so many hours that when I closed my eyes at night I saw the white bulbs traveling through the earth like sperm. The sun warmed the back of my neck as my fingers reached into the damp earth like they were roots themselves. I stayed out in the rain. I kneeled in the mud; I didn’t answer the phone. I had new deadlines: a bed to dig, seedlings to transplant, mulching, watering, feeding to do.

  One day late that third spring, when the chestnut blossoms on the trees had already faded, I came in at sunset after a full day’s gardening and stood at the bathroom sink to wash my hands. I glanced at my face in the mirror and noticed for the first time that it was next to Mary’s face on the varnished print. It looked like we were standing next to each other. Mary wore a mysterious half-smile as her hand gently pointed to the red heart on her sky-blue dress; flames shot out the top (passion); a sword went right through it (pain); tears dripped down (sorrow); but beautiful pink roses made a ring around it, too (joy, celebration, beauty, grace, redemption).

  That heart told a story like a novel. It was just like life: complicated, changing, never the same. And Mary was showing this to me. I started to weep and didn’t know why. But I think it was from gratefulness. My heart wasn’t feeling so cracked anymore. It was feeling l
ike one of Mary’s hearts: a sword had pierced it, but roses encircled it, too.

  That summer I grew a dozen herbs; Borghese, San Remo, and cherry tomatoes so sweet they gave me a sugar rush. I grew beans and peppers, lettuces, squash, garlic. My sunflowers grew taller than my clothesline pole; my basil plants were as high as my hip. The hollyhocks towered over my shed. And the Canterbury bells grew into the purple trumpet flowers from my meditations three winters ago. The purple trumpets grew so abundantly and for so long I thought that surely my envisioning them day after day had nourished the real flowers as much as the vision had nourished me.

  One day Nancy brought her friend Anthony, who’d gone into the seminary, to my backyard, and he declared it a miracle. Anthony said I’d summoned the divas. I thought divas were opera singers, but he told me these devas, with an e not an i, were the helpers of fairies, and when they sense love being poured into the earth, they come and pour whatever nutrients the plants need into the soil.

  I had no idea I’d summoned the devas, and I had no idea I’d summoned Mary, either. I’d made a shrine of my house, and knowing a good opportunity when she sees one, the Blessed Mother came in.

  In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by these words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” . . . Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God. And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

  —The Gospel According to Luke

  Mary did not just fall down on her knees and submit to whatever the angel from God proposed to her. She wondered what exactly this angel was saying, so the angel rushed to assure her that she would not be the only one giving birth under miraculous circumstances. The angel had visited Elizabeth too; Elizabeth had been barren but was now pregnant. The young cousin and the old cousin would have babies six months apart; their children would both be prophets. Elizabeth’s was John the Baptist. When Mary hears that she is not alone, that her cousin will accompany her on this strange journey—and no doubt give her strength and support—she takes heart. She believes that this angel in front of her is no hallucination, and courageously finds the faith to accept her fate. And so Mary says graciously, “Let it be . . . ,” then wastes no time in departing to visit Elizabeth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On a stopover at the Rome airport on my way to Medjugorje, I spot a man holding a Mother Missions sign at the exit and head over. Most of my fellow pilgrims have arrived on a different plane, but a few had been on my flight, and I pass two of them at the luggage carousel. They’re old ladies with tightly permed gray hair, whom I’d noticed on the plane by the Mother Missions name tags pinned to their crocheted vests. In fact, had I not changed from a window to an aisle at check-in, they would have been my seatmates, and I would not have ended up trapped next to a six-foot-tall Sicilian ex-soccer player who wouldn’t leave me alone. Was I married? Did I have a boyfriend? Was he meeting me in Italy? I’d been forced to lie to shut him up, which was no way to start a religious retreat. And it hadn’t worked, anyway. He’d reached over and grabbed my tableware to rip the plastic open for me, and when the lights went out he leaned his shoulder and then his head into mine, and his fingers tickled my thigh. I swatted his hands away and hung halfway into the aisle.

  Thinking about this in the airport, I promise myself that for the duration of this pilgrimage I am going to stop exerting my will and practice surrendering—even as I rub my hands like Lady Macbeth doing Out Damned Spot, and will myself to stop scratching them. My hands have become infested with blisters the size of fleas and are itching me like mad. In New York before I left, my hands had gotten so bad I couldn’t sleep, eat, or think, and when a few of the bumps turned brown and flattened to the size of nickels, I went to the emergency room. The doctor looked it up in a book and showed me a black-and-white picture of hands identical to mine. It was not poison ivy, as I’d hoped, but a recurring nervous condition for which there was no cure.

  There were good reasons for my nervous reaction. My idea had been that if I acted as though I had faith, then faith would follow, and so I’d signed up for the only pilgrimage I could find to Bosnia at a time I could get away: ten days in Medjugorje, six of them at a no-talking-allowed retreat, during which we would fast on bread and tea and submit ourselves to brainwashing by a Franciscan with three advanced degrees. Afterwards, we would go on a weeklong miraculous-sites-of-Italy tour.

  I’m afraid both that nothing will happen and that I’ll experience a spiritual conversion that will turn me into a holy person I won’t even recognize, or have the desire to speak to. It actually occurs to me that my hands are peeling themselves raw so new lines of identity can etch into my palms.

  I rub my hands discreetly on my luggage as I reach the man with the Mother Missions sign, who is being yelled at by a woman with a pink plastic barrette placed asymmetrically above each ear. “We have to wait nine hours?” She slams a book against her thigh. A Bible?

  I let her know I empathize by smiling at her, but she doesn’t smile back. She looks at me as she continues to yell at the man. “You planned it this way?” She shakes her head as she walks away. “I just wish I’d have known.”

  “Oh, you’re the journalist,” the man says when I introduce myself. “I’m Bruce.” Bruce, along with his wife, Annalena, are the organizers of the pilgrimage. We’d talked a few times on the phone.

  “I’m not a journalist, I’m a writer,” I clarify. “Journalist” makes me nervous. It implies objectivity, which I do not like to claim in the best of circumstances, and certainly not while I’m in the market for a spiritual conversion.

  Bruce puts his hand on my arm. “Nobody goes to Medjugorje and comes back the same. You are in for the time of your life. Last year I climbed Mount Krizevac barefoot.”

  “Why’d you do that?” I have a hand-rubbing frenzy.

  He blinks, confused by my inability to understand something that to him is so obvious, but he recovers. “Out of love for Our Lady. You’ll see. You have no idea what you are about to experience.”

  A crowd has gathered, who all seem to wear glasses as big as windows and look like they feed from the snack aisle at the supermarket; half of them are in jogging suits. I close my eyes and pray: If only there were one other woman with lipstick. . . . I open my eyes and, I swear to God, there are two women with lipstick, wheeling a wide load of expensive luggage in my direction.

  “Sisters?” I ask. They have something of a Mutt-and-Jeff thing going but are dressed almost identically in flower-patterned long skirts and silk knit sweaters, with tasteful pumps and manicures.

  “Uh, huh. I’m Arlene,” the short one says, “and this is Alma.”

  “Little Majesty”—Alma smiles, indicating Arlene—“and Little Sista—” she bows, indicating herself. The sisters have southern accents.

  “You’re the boss because you’re older or shorter?” I ask Arlene.

  “She’s older and shorter, but that’s not why she’s the boss,” Alma says. “Let’s just say she’s queenly. You’ll see. And you?”

  “I’m Beverly. Just call me the Lapsed Catholic. I’m a writer.”

  “How lovely,” says Li
ttle Majesty.

  The three of us become so involved talking, we spend the nine hours before we leave for Bosnia eating dry lasagna and sipping Cokes at the snack bar instead of taking a look around Rome. The sisters are mothers of grown children, too. The sisters had been raised Catholic by their Cajun grandma and single mother. While Little Majesty always stayed near home, Little Sista went far away to college. Both had been schoolteachers, but Alma was now the deputy superintendent of schools in her city, and Arlene had retired at fifty to do charity work sponsored by her wealthy businessman husband. Alma had divorced and remarried, yet received the holy sacrament of communion right next to her Presbyterian husband every Sunday—a sin, as defined by the Church and the intransigent Pope—and Arlene disapproves. “We’re supposed to be obedient,” Little Majesty intones, more wistfully than chidingly.

  “Father Diego”—obviously Alma’s pastor—“doesn’t object. He knows I’m divorced. He knows John’s not Catholic.”

  “We’re not supposed to criticize our priests.”

  “Father Diego is a wonderful priest.”

  “I’m not saying he isn’t. We’ll just pray to Our Lady.”

  “Yes, Little Majesty.”

  “How old’s your son, Beverly?” Little Majesty changes the subject.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “You must have been awfully young,” says Little Majesty.

  “I was.”

  “Like Our Lady,” says Alma.

  I lived in Orient for six years, and one night my last year there, I invited a new neighbor named Daniel to a dinner party, and after a tour of my house, I overheard him say to another man, “So what do you think of Beverly’s Mary cathexis?” Daniel was a psychiatrist; his comment gave me a little jolt. So when he left, I looked “cathexis” up in the dictionary. It means: “Investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.” Mary was all over my house; I had to admit I had a Mary cathexis. And a while later, when I finally asked Daniel his psychoanalytic opinion of my condition, he went further. “I think there’s a restorative fantasy, an identification. Whereas Mary conceived in holiness and grace, you conceived in dishonor and disgrace”—which I had to admit was also true.