by Kris Radish
Meggie had no idea that Sister A had been listening to her talk on the playground, in the bathroom and everywhere else there was a place to hide and listen. What Sister heard Meggie Callie say was that she was going to college and she was not going to be a teacher or a nun or work at a grocery store. She heard Meggie Callie say that she was going to be a doctor or maybe an astronaut or someone who traveled, like an anthropologist, who could look at how people lived and study their habits and determine things that no one else knew.
Once Margaret Joan Callie even had the nerve to say that maybe she would run for some kind of government office so that she could change the world. She didn't want to be President, Meggie said one day behind the old bleachers, but she did want to be a politician who listened to people and who was there one day when someone decided to call, and the Senator would be right on the phone, saying, “Hey, how are ya?” Meggie also had the audacity to mention the fact that she wondered sometimes if there really was a God.
This was a horrible sin. It was the worst sin. Meggie was talking to Cynthia Ann Hanlon and she had questions about everything.
“Would God want us to be scared like this all the time?” Meggie asked her quiet friend.
“I don't know,” said Cynthia, who would later get pregnant in tenth grade and eventually end up married three times.
“Think about it,” urged Meggie. “We are afraid in church—I mean, what if the chapel veil slips off—we are afraid to not go to church, because we could be struck dead; we have a book of rules as long as this sidewalk, and if we don't memorize them then we are also going to rot in Hell.”
“I never thought about it. . . .”
“Well, does this sound like the kind of thing a kind and loving God wants us to do?”
Meggie didn't wait for an answer now because she was on one of her “things” and there was no stopping her, or the big ears of Sister A, who was trying hard not to reach out and slap this hussy of a girl upside the head.
“Sometimes when I am going to the bathroom I wonder if I am even doing that the right way, because it's rule this and rule that. No wonder people just sit in the pews and shut up, because there are new rules every week.”
Cynthia looked at her friend in amazement. She was more worried about Robert Fleischman's new pants than she was about this stuff. Who cared?
“We're just supposed to do it, you know?” Cynthia pointed out flatly. “Maybe they don't even know if we screw up. I mean, it's not like someone is watching.”
“That's what they want us to think. Remember when we studied about mind control and stuff like that in science?”
Cynthia looked around just to see if anyone really might be watching. She didn't want to listen anymore. She wanted to go find Bobby. He had on the greatest pants.
“Are you leaving?” Meggie asked.
“Yes,” Cynthia said, and she was gone.
This is when Sister A sprang into action. She was so furious that the hair under her veil was soaked and sweat dripped down the back of her neck. If there wasn't a commandment that said, Do Not Kill, she would have her hands around Margaret's meaty and evil little throat in a second.
She came around the corner so fast that Meggie had no idea what hit her, and she was definitely hit. Sister A backhanded her across the face, and there was an instant welt on her right cheek the exact size of Sister's knuckles. The slap took the wind out of her and for a moment she thought she would faint.
No words were spoken. Sister A grabbed Meggie by the arm and dragged her across the gym, down the brown-tiled hallway, and threw her, actually threw her, into the teachers' lounge. No one Meggie knew had ever been into the teachers' lounge, and this is where Meggie discovered that nuns go to the bathroom. This is where she also discovered the potential cruelty of the human heart.
The room was empty. Sister Aloysius backed Meggie against the concrete wall and pushed her face against Meggie's. Meggie could see down her throat and she sensed something so horrible that she had a hard time breathing. Evil. She sensed something evil.
“Who do you think you are?” the nun hissed. “Do you really think you can be who you want to be? Do you?”
Meggie could not speak. She was afraid she was going to wet her pants. She prayed, because prayers were supposed to save you, but there was no saving her from Sister Aloysius.
“Girls are nothing, absolutely nothing. We are here to serve the men, the priests, the men who will be lawyers and politicians and who will always rule the world. We clean the bathrooms and take what is left. What makes you think you can have the kind of life you talk about?”
There was no answer from Meggie, who was crying like she had never cried before. What if Sister was right? What if she couldn't be who she wanted to be?
“Your A's mean nothing and your talk means nothing. Until you humble your spirit, you will have and be nothing. Girls? You are crazy. We are dust on men's feet, and it's time you realize your sinful ways and beg God for forgiveness.”
Begging was something Meggie thought she could do just then. She did not want to be hit again, and she wasn't. What happened next was worse than hitting.
Sister A opened up the supply closet, the closet with no lights in it, no place to sit, no bathroom, and she pushed Meggie inside of it. Without a word, she locked the door and left.
Meggie stayed in the room for five hours. She heard people moving outside the door and heard the bus leave, but Sister Aloysius knew that Meggie walked home. Meggie cried and she prayed and she begged God to forgive her and she promised that she would do whatever it was He wanted her to do. She didn't have to go to college and save the world. She didn't have to go to law school. She would cook and clean and do whatever she had to, if only she could get out of the dark and scary room. She promised over and over again, for what seemed the longest moments of her life.
When she heard the door unlock, she waited before she pushed it open, and then she ran all the way home.
Margaret Joan Callie never told anyone about what happened that day. She never spoke to Cynthia behind the bleachers or anyone else ever again about what she believed or didn't believe. She sat perfectly still during Mass and she slowly carved away the edges of her dreams until they fit into a box that was designed by someone else.
My Aunt Marcia drove to Mexico with a car full of friends in 1959. She told me they packed the trunk with blankets, canned food, spare car parts and the dying echoes of their parents, who all but tried to tie the bumper of my aunt's used Buick to the side of my grandma's house. Women just didn't do something like that.
“Jesus, honey, they thought we'd get fried into some beans and rice, and they'd never see us again.” My aunt laughed as she told me the story when I was a teenager. “When Gretchen, Joannie, Barbara and I turned the corner to leave, hours before dawn, we saw your grandma, Barbara's mom and three neighbors standing in the middle of the street holding their bathrobes closed and weeping into each other's arms.”
“What was it like?” I asked her, wishing with all my heart that I'd been the last thing they had put on top of the spare tire.
“Oh, Meggie, it was a miracle of colors and tastes and scents and sounds. We slept on beaches at the edge of communities where people had never seen a white woman before. We roasted chilies on open fires and bought matching silver rings and bracelets from a man who kissed each one of us as he put the rings on our fingers.”
Aunt Marcia said they danced in the streets with other women and children during a birthday fiesta while wild doggies nipped at their heels, and when their radiator exploded, they spent two weeks camping behind a village store that gave them a breathtaking view of mountains that turned purple every evening.
Twenty years following that three-month trip, she still wore her silver ring and the thick silver bracelet, which she touched constantly, slipping it up and down her wrist from the tip of her knuckle to the middle part of her arm. I believed there were secrets in the bracelet, memories from the trip that she could remember
and bring to life whenever she touched it.
“Tell me again about the dancing dogs,” I would ask her every single time I saw her, and then, because I knew she would never say no, I would watch her caress the grooves in the bracelet with the tips of her fingers as if she were rubbing specks of silver into her own flesh.
I remember listening to her stories about this particular trip to Mexico with my eyes closed. I had seen the faded photos from old National Geographic magazines and I could see in my mind the dogs jumping and my aunt and her friends moving in a circle and then the dust would fly and the dogs would go wild when the men in the streets pounded harder and harder on the backs of their guitars until no one, even the doggies, could stand another second.
Something really wondrous happened on that trip and every single thing that happened was remarkable. I know it like I am beginning to know all my missed chances. My Auntie Marcia had pushed through some kind of invisible barrier that kept most other women home and tied into place so that if they tried to run they would dig a hole that got larger and larger until they disappeared and suffocated on the dirt they'd kicked up with their own heels. Auntie Marcia never suffocated. She was wild and free and there was not one thing about my aunt that did not seem dangerous and extravagant.
My mother looked at her the same way I did—with eyes of wonder and envy. My mother who had stapled herself to a lifestyle that I thought eventually might kill her. My mother who could never quite seem to let go of the rope holding her boat to the safe dock and who then passed the rope on to me. Rope burns be damned, because neither of us could ever figure out how to let go.
When my auntie died, I asked for the bracelet and the ring. My mother brought them to me weeks after the funeral. She told me that she had found the ring and bracelet wrapped inside of a Mexican silk scarf and sitting right on top of my aunt's dresser.
“She must have taken it off right before she left for the hospital,” my mother said, sobbing with such grief that she fell into my arms. “She left a note for you sweetie. She wanted you to have the bracelet and the ring. How did you know?”
How could I not know? My aunt tried so hard to show me her spirit so that I might catch on fire as she did. She all but took me by the hand and into all the corners of her world so that I could see what I was missing. I held that ring and bracelet a hundred times growing up and rubbed the softness of the metal into my skin, memorizing what each curve of them felt like, their weight, how my aunt never let them tarnish. They became everything that she was and had experienced and everything that I had once longed to be.
I sat down to open the cloth package because my own well of sorrow at the loss of my glorious auntie made me weak and lost, and when I peeled back the layers of red and blue and green tissue paper, I saw that she had polished the jewelry and there was another note. My heart exploded and I could feel an ache for her and what we had rise inside of me so fast and furious, I thought that I might be sick.
My mother's hand moved to my arm, but she turned away when I opened the note.
“My sweet, beautiful Meggie, how wonderful we have been and what a gift you were to me all the years I lived after you were born. You were the daughter I never had, the challenge of my wild soul and the light in my eyes. Your sweet laugh and your stacks of books and your questions and all those ideas kept me alive months and months when I wanted to go away. Do you know that, sweetheart? Remember the stories from Mexico? You loved the damn story about the dancing dogs and I loved to tell it to you. I want you to have this magic bracelet, for it really is magic, and this beautiful ring too, and I want you to go see the dancing dogs. Your mother will have some money for this trip. I left it in my account for you, and you are a young woman now and it is time for you to go. Inside of the money packet there are vague instructions to the village where the girls and I stayed. It will be an adventure for you to find it. When you do, someone there will remember the dogs, and their grandchildren may still be dancing. Ask, please if Pancho Gonzales Quintana is still alive, and go see him. He will show you something that will help you, because you have always needed just a bit of help, Meggie, and you are too damn stubborn or afraid to see where you really need to go. Do this for me. You must take someone with you, but it cannot be a man. You must invite a close girlfriend or two and you must remember the stories I told you and watch for the orange sky and the twinkle in the eyes of all the beautiful men who will look at you as you walk through town in your purple skirt. Meggie, never be afraid. Fear can wash away your dreams and fill up all the corners of your heart. You can drown in your fear. Do you hear this? Someday you will have to begin living, and how you do that will be a huge surprise to you because it will be like nothing you ever imagined. Nothing at all.
I want you to dance, my little darling, and always carry my love for you, which you know is endless. Even after this sad body of mine moves away, my love for you is endless.
Love,
The Mexican Queen
Today I am on a plane with the wildest woman I know and my new sidekick, Jane. Elizabeth has her hair tied up in a rainbow of ribbons and she is wearing shorts, really short black denim shorts, with those damned cowboy boots, and we are going to find the dancing dogs. Dr. C ordered me to leave my life. “Take a break or I'll make you take medication,” she threatened the night she called me after I could not leave her office. “Do not go alone, but go. You must go.”
Jane has latched on to me and to Dr. C and even though I feel as if it is the blind leading the blind and the deaf and the dumb and the terribly foolish, she—by luck of the draw and distance from relatives and because her husband really was a royal asshole—truly has no one but me. Well, now she also has Elizabeth and parts of Aunt Marcia and anything else she can squeeze out of us. Right after Jane moved to our neighborhood from Boston, her husband took off. He left her a note on the table, half the cash, a car and signed divorce papers that had been in the works for months. After Elizabeth and I settle her soul, we will begin a nationwide manhunt for this man and drag him naked behind our car through the next women's festival. In the meantime, I am supposed to be Jane's guiding light, and I take great comfort in being around her, because she is much worse off than I am—or so I think. She has a kind of innocence that Elizabeth and I cannot ignore. We have looped her into our circle and we have promised to stand with her until she can fly on her own. Today Mexico—tomorrow maybe, just maybe, Chicago.
Dr. C ordered me into some kind of forced retreat, and only then did I remember the trip money. I never went to Mexico like I was supposed to. There was school and my father blocking the door and then I got married so damn fast, but I'd kept the money. I could not bear to spend a penny of it, and when I showed my aunt's note to Elizabeth, she said, “If you don't take me I will never speak to you again” and within thirty minutes we had tickets to Mexico and neither of us could bear not to invite Jane, who sobbed for twenty-six minutes when I called to invite her.
It was much easier to rearrange my life for fourteen days than I could have imagined. I had plenty of vacation time coming from my job, my daughter only needs me occasionally now that I am back near her nest, and I am so estranged from my husband, I cannot imagine he would miss me if I never bothered to tell him I was leaving. When I did tell him, I am certain a huge sigh of relief passed from his stomach into his throat and he nearly wept for joy. Getting ready for Mexico took my mind off the fact that I am an inch away from going nuts and have totally lost my personal identity—not that I had one to begin with.
Preparing for an all but abandoned adventure was not easy, but I could not have picked two more wonderful traveling companions. Jane was so glad to be doing anything, to get a break from her job search, from trying to sell her house and from the dungeon of her marriage, she obeyed us like a trained bird. Elizabeth set the rules from the moment I asked her to go on the trip, and the more I thought about it the more I liked the rules.
“Sweetheart,” she said, leaning into me and pulling my face next to
hers, “there are no rules.”
“Okay,” I stammered, because the idea of no rules had never entered even the outer edges of my mind. Not in the past twenty years anyway.
“And, this is very important.”
“What?”
“What happens to us, where we go, who we meet, anything at all—it stays with us.”
“We can't even tell the doctor?”
“We cannot even tell the doctor, unless you desperately need to say something that might save you from madness, and then it has to be in vague terms, like ‘I felt free,' or ‘I had the greatest orgasm of my life.'”
“Are we going to have orgasms?”
“God, I hope so,” Elizabeth said, laughing as if her throat were on fire.
Jane turned white during this part of the discussion, and I simply reached over to touch her hand. What happened to Jane? Did she miss the '70s? My. My. My.
“Do you have any idea how long it's been since I even said the word orgasm?” I asked Elizabeth.
“You are a disgrace to womanhood, darling,” Elizabeth said, more than half seriously. “Do you have an idea how important it is to talk about sex, have sex, and to simply say anything sexy as often as possible so the world will realize that it's women and not men who need sex?”
“This conversation could be endless,” I said, shuddering. “And we have to catch a plane.”
Which is what we did, and when I felt the rise of the wings and the grinding of the airplane tires being sucked into the bowels of the airplane as we started our journey, I asked Elizabeth to hold my hand and I felt, through her fingers, the long dark veins of my Auntie Marcia and the whisper of her promises and a long sigh sliding from inside of me that came from a place so deep and old and tired that I imagined it was a fairly large pit that was close to the very bottom of my heart.
