Joy

by Erin McGraw

  At first I didn’t notice her silence. Not until I looked up from the keypad did I see her glaring at me. “I don’t have a cat. I’ve never had a cat. Not every old woman has a cat.”

  Reflexively I looked around, ready to be embarrassed, but Denise was already gone, and there were no other customers.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” Iris said.

  “Same as your cat,” I said.

  “I doubt it. My cat likes me.”

  Iris paid in cash, the last two dollars in coins. After the door closed behind her, I took her package, slipped it into a sturdy box and wrote the address legibly. I used cat stamps for the postage. Those were all the things I was supposed to do. Next I did the thing I wanted: cracking the box hard across my knee, stamping it FRAGILE, and dumping it in the outgoing mail. There was a box there from Ron McClurg, too, and I picked it up and shook it. Nothing broken yet.

  Priest

  When Father Tom comes to a party, people look embarrassed, even the ones who invited him. It’s the collar. At wedding and funeral receptions, he is seated at the table with the great-aunts. He is the necessary conduit, but he frightens people who hear “priest” and imagine no house, no family, no sex. “You must have started so young!” a parishioner recently said to him. “I’m always surprised when young men—”

  She faltered, and Father Tom was moved to pity. “Me, too,” he said.

  He didn’t start especially young. He went to college, got a job as a loan officer, and tried to understand the misery that swept over him every morning when he cinched up his tie. He had a girlfriend and met his car payments. There was no reason for him to find himself standing in his apartment garage with a rope and instructions he’d downloaded for tying a noose.

  “I’m glad you didn’t follow through,” said the priest Tom talked to later, because a priest was cheaper than a therapist.

  “Bad at knots,” Tom said.

  The priest thought Tom’s answer was God, of course, and Tom forgave him for that. It was the priest’s job to think that despair at life’s unsolvable monotony could be solved by God, and it was Tom’s job to listen politely, go home, and get any ropes or extension cords out of the house.

  He was back at the church a week later. “Give me something to do,” Tom said, and the priest handed him a rake. Three hours later, when he had sweated through his flannel shirt and streaked his face with leaf dirt, he felt better than he had felt in months. “What else do you have?” he asked the priest, who told him to come back after he’d had a shower.

  He tutored kids in math and washed forks after the parish potluck. He vacuumed the sacristy. He braced himself for the inevitable next talk about God, which came like clockwork. “How can you be so sure you’re not priest material?” the priest said.

  “I’m not sure I believe in God,” Tom said.

  “You don’t have to be sure about God. You just have to believe in God’s work,” the priest said, words that Tom could not resist. The work—God’s work, whatever—was everywhere, the world bleeding from every orifice. “How can you stand it?” his girlfriend asked after he spent a weekend locked in with violent offenders.

  “They’re people, too,” he said lamely, unable to meet her sad eyes. Tom and his girlfriend hadn’t had sex in weeks, hadn’t been out to dinner in months, but he kept volunteering for the lock-ins. He felt coherent with the killers and freaks. When he moved toward ordination and one examiner after another asked him whether he was sure he had a vocation, he told them, “I don’t think anyone can be sure. But I feel close to myself when I’m doing this work.” Once upon a time, the examiners would have pressed him about whether he felt close to God, but no one talked like that anymore.

  But now, now that the vows are finished and the rest of his life is signed away and set out to collect dust, he’s tired of being close to himself. At the end of the day, after the meetings are finished and the computer shut off, the unanswerable questions return. When his mother was close to death, she caught at his sleeve and pulled until his ear was next to her mouth. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m not supposed to be afraid. It means I don’t have faith.”

  “Mom, everybody—”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to go to hell.”

  He almost laughed. “Trust me. You’re not.”

  She turned her face from him and died two days later, and nothing the mortician did could erase the terror from her face.

  He prays for her, of course. But there isn’t enough prayer in the world. Not for his mother, not for the hemophiliac girl he knew in grade school who got knocked down and bled out on the playground, not for continents full of children waking up with a stomach full of hungry and no food for miles. No one has answers, his confessor has told him. Is that supposed to make Father Tom feel better?

  One night, maddened by his circling, ceaseless thoughts, he dropped to the worn carpet and forced himself through push-ups until his arms gave out. He hadn’t done push-ups since he was in high school, and his arms burned after twenty, but at least he quit thinking about the argument he’d had with his mother the night before he started college, the one that left her weeping in the bathroom after he told her that heaven was a fairy tale. In the morning he made himself pray the Daily Office, which he skipped so often he hardly remembered how to do it.

  The trick is to drive away thoughts. No wonder the ancients believed in demons; as far as Father Tom can see, demonic possession is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret the memories that assail him. “Do you have trouble not thinking about sex?” his confessor asks in a confiding tone. Sex is the least of it. Father Tom remembers his girlfriend’s face, scrubbed of emotion, when he told her he was going to become a priest. “So I get dumped for Jesus,” she said.

  Sometimes he prays, sometimes he does squats or jumping jacks, one week he drank a glass of water every half hour, peed like a racehorse, and lost two pounds. These actions—mortifications, to use the old word—make him a better priest, a better person. If he’d discovered discipline a little sooner, he wouldn’t have made his mother cry and might never have entered the priesthood. Wearing his belt one notch too tight, he counseled a gay fourteen-year-old for three straight hours. The boy was cutting himself; he showed Father Tom the neat scars laddering up his leg. Father Tom leaned back in his chair, feeling the belt sawing at his soft waist. “What would happen?” he said. “What would happen if you never cut yourself again? What if you made peace with the dryness in your heart?” The boy is in college now, and his mother thinks he’s happy.

  A few weeks after that counseling session, Father Tom holds a blade against his thigh, bouncing it lightly. The razor blade makes a light pinging sensation on his skin; it’s keen and unexpectedly lighthearted. Father Tom is teasing himself; nothing will come of this. He has too much work to do. Just a week ago he agreed to spearhead a new outreach to troubled youth downtown, an agreement he made while knuckling a finger backward painfully under the desk. “I’m so glad,” said the social worker who had called the meeting, a brisk woman with a terrible haircut. “No one reaches people better than you do. Sometimes I think, when I look at you, that I’m seeing the face of Jesus.”

  “Jesus is either horrified or laughing himself sick,” Father Tom said.

  “You need to learn to accept a compliment, Father.”

  “Thank you,” he said, forcing his finger back a millimeter further. The woman meant to be kind, and he was not ungrateful. She had no way to understand that Father Tom and Jesus have worked out their own understanding. In the meantime, he will practice the little deaths, every day. Death, which Jesus treated so cavalierly, will eventually come to save Father Tom. It is a life. It makes him happy.

  Artist

  After a long shoot my shoulders and back ache, and if anybody can tell me about a bar nearby, I head straight over. The faceys don’t go because they’ve already had their eight hundred calories for the day, but the hand
model is allowed to drink a beer. “Just don’t let my fingers get cut,” I tell the bartenders, who open bottles for me. Sometimes, if I’ve been there for a while, I copy the old frat-boy trick and open the bottle with my teeth. Nobody cares about my teeth.

  Today’s shoot was Mop Up paper towels. All day long I snaked my arm around the refreshed roll of Mop Ups so that the camera saw a youthful hand effortlessly ripping off a single perfect towel. Claudio, the photographer who says he’s an artist, noted every time I missed my mark. “To the left. Make it light,” he said. “No veins.” My fingers light as wind, I ripped towel after towel, careful to keep my shadow out of the shot. “Too far. No veins!”

  You would drink, too. I’ll bet Claudio did, off at an important bar with the water-drinking faceys. He was explaining to them how he’s an artist, and they were nodding, because they were his art.

  Officially my title is parts model. Some girls don’t just do hands, but feet, too, or even legs. My only part is hands. I watch TV clumsily, hands dipped in lanolin and covered by heavy latex mittens, and scrutinize other hands peeling a banana or wiping a window. Don’t for one second imagine this isn’t a serious business. There are new hands, young ones, coming along every day.

  In my other life I’m a temp. “No cooking jobs,” I say, and ideally no typing jobs, either. I can’t afford anything that might nick my nail polish or make my hands look muscular; the ideal hand model’s hands are as free of definition as pooled cream, like the hands of a Chinese concubine.

  “And you know about Chinese concubines how?” says Greg. He was waiting for me at the bar tonight, though we hadn’t made any plans. He’s my favorite photographer, joking through every shoot and working at a speed that a mortal can keep up with. Back when we were together—not long—we joked that we were the power couple of parts modeling.

  “Saw a TV show.”

  “You watch too much TV.”

  “It’s how I do my homework.” I pluck one napkin from the dispenser, making sure to display its snowiness. The napkin is the star. Then I pick up my martini glass so that he can see the slight tilt at the end of my thumb. That thumb and the narrow back of my hand are my big assets. They separate me from the girls who think that straight fingers and deep nail beds are enough.

  “You sure you need that?” Greg says.

  “A photographer is criticizing somebody else’s drinking?”

  “You’ve got a shoot tomorrow.”

  He’s looking at the tabletop, not me. We both know that it doesn’t matter if I come to a shoot with bloodshot eyes, as long as I can hold a candle or tomato or bottle of furniture polish with rock-steady hands. “What have you heard?”

  “Claudio is bitching.”

  “Claudio is a bitch.”

  Greg’s voice sinks. “On the last job? With the facey?”

  It was a moisturizer spot, and I was the hands. Those jobs are murder: I crouch behind the facey and guess where her chin is, her throat, her mouth. Even on my best days there are some misses, and a few times makeup had to come and completely redo her. No matter what you think, I never meant to smear her lipstick. “There’s no hand model in the world who doesn’t sometimes miss.”

  “Claudio says there are a lot. He says he’s not going to work with you anymore. He wants you off the shoot.”

  “It’s a goddamn paper-towel spot. Artist, my ass.”

  “It’s work. Do you have anything else lined up?”

  I looked at my martini, mystifyingly half empty. What I had lined up was two weeks filling in for a receptionist at a gypsum company. I did not know what gypsum was.

  “Claudio’s a loudmouth,” Greg said. “Don’t give him anything to talk about. You can get your career back on track.” He patted my shoulder before he left.

  Who has a career as a parts model? Kimbra Hickey. Her pallid hands hold the luridly red apple on the cover of Twilight, the book on millions of shelves in America. She goes to Twilight conferences where she takes pictures with her fans. Now that she’s famous, people want to see her face. She re-creates the Twilight pose with apples that fans provide and signs a few autographs, though not enough to endanger her hands’ sweet, untested look.

  Kimbra Hickey can afford to have someone sign books for her, open bottles for her, drive cars and pick cherries and play the violin for her. “I’m in a bar now so I don’t have to make my own martini,” I say to the air. The bartender and I share a moment’s gaze that could mean anything. If I’d been a facey, he would have gotten my phone number.

  Instead, I go home. On the table next to my front door is a tub of industrial-strength moisturizer that I put on immediately; it makes my hands slippery, but it smooths them out like nothing else. Then I go to the refrigerator where a half-full bottle of sauvignon blanc needs to be drunk tonight if it’s going to be any good. I’m doing fine, I’m perfectly stable, I can handle two martinis, and then the bottle slips and I dive for it and I’m on the floor with shards of wine bottle all around me, including the one slicing into the meat of my right hand, the hand that holds things. In an instant I’m holding a palmful of blood. Thick blood furling over sheet-white hands: it’s what Kimbra Hickey was suggesting with that apple. A photographer should be here.

  This is such a good idea that I get up to call Greg. He doesn’t live far away, and now, in my kitchen, I’ve got the image that could make my career. But when I pick up my phone I realize that I have my own camera. It isn’t easy, holding the blood-slick phone with my left hand, but I can look at my perfect right hand, a lotus, red at the center. I see exactly how it needs to be. By tomorrow there will be a scar, and I will have to learn about gypsum. Now I manipulate the petals that are my fingers. They throb like strobe lights. This is art. I take the picture.

  Parable

  Letting Joyce play the organ is an act of Christian charity. She comes every night at five, and her knotted fingers collapse from one wrong key into another while she holds the same pedal down for measure after measure until the sound is nothing but collision. We can hear it from the office, where productivity goes way up around four thirty.

  The arrangement has worked fine, even though my assistant rector Michelle is champing at the bit to have a security system installed so Joyce would have to code herself in, a system Joyce couldn’t possibly remember. Michelle reminds us that there are microphones in the church, and sometimes the kids leave guitars. “Somebody could steal us blind.” No one’s done it yet, and if Michelle wants to take Joyce’s key away, she can do it herself.

  Joyce is old, she’s lonely, she’s unwashed. Yesterday she caught me in my office when I was trying to find one new thing to say about the parable of the talents. She cleared her throat and asked if I was busy, and I answered with the kind of heartiness that makes children cry. Come in! Come in!

  She shuffled in the door, managing to make her loafers sound like house slippers. Her head was sunk between her shoulders, and her face was almost maroon. At first I thought she was having a heart attack, but the poor woman was blushing.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “That’s good, Joyce. That’s what I’m here for. Sit down, please.”

  “Something happened to me. While I was playing the organ.”

  “Did somebody say anything to you? Did somebody break in?”

  She snorted grimly. “My playing doesn’t exactly attract people.”

  “No one wants to disturb you,” I said lamely.

  “You’re kind to give me time. But it’s your job to be kind.”

  “Won’t you sit down, Joyce?”

  “I—.” Both frightened and hostile, she was a starving dog protecting its single, stripped-bare bone. She stared at me with eyes so round and red they looked boiled, then turned and left the office before I could stop her, her loafers shff, shff, shff down the hall. The woman is eighty-four, and she’s been coming to this church for sixty-five years. She’s been widowed as long as I’ve known her, but I don’t know whether she has children, or w
here she grew up. I stared at the spot where she’d stood and let shame coat the inside of my mouth. Tonight, a little past five, I went into the church.

  Joyce was playing what she has always played: an unwavering 4/4 rhythm, straight-up third-fifth chords, music like cinderblocks. She went through five mind-numbing verses of “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” without so much as a grace note’s variation. By the time she stopped, my shoulders were up to my ears. I called out, “Can we go back to our conversation?”

  After a long pause, she said, “It isn’t a conversation. It’s a confession.”

  I said, “It can’t be that bad, Joyce,” a little more honest than I should have been.

  She waited me out, staying at the keyboard until I made my way to her, and she looked down at me from the organ bench. She said, “I used to try to do the things real organists do, but I just sounded stupid, so I do what I know how to do. I play the hymns. Please don’t think I’m putting on airs.”

  “No one would think that.”

  After a full minute, she said, “The other night, about a week ago, I heard a noise while I was playing. I stopped, but I didn’t see anybody. Then I started playing again, and I heard a creak, as if a door was opening or somebody sitting in a pew. When it was no one the second time, I knew my ears were playing tricks on me. So I kept playing. I sang, too.” She swallowed. She sings like the old woman she is, one long quaver.

  “How strange,” I said.

  “Please just listen. I finished the last verse, the noise was a lot louder, and I looked beyond the lectern. The sanctuary was full of people. People were here, hundreds of them, taking up the pews and the aisles. They were talking to each other and nodding, waiting for the service to start. They looked happy to be here. I was not taking drugs.”