“What?” Nenny said, and they all looked at him. “What did she say?”
“Oh, she had a question about tuition or something,” Dad said, having already forgotten a conversation that took place literally two seconds ago. Why didn’t Mom ask to talk to them? Why didn’t he pass the phone around? It didn’t occur to either of them that they might want to talk to their mom? Nenny sits at her desk in the circle, doodling squares inside of squares, distracted and a little sick, because someone—anyone—is supposed to be captain of this ship, but they just keep running the ship aground.
The lead in her pencil snaps, she’s pressing so hard. Before, with Sister Timothy, you had to raise your hand to sharpen your pencil, you had to raise your hand for everything—permission to use the bathroom, permission to get a drink of water—but Mary lets them do things without raising their hands. Nenny rises from her desk and goes to the sharpener by the window.
Outside, the sky is a burnished blue, the playground empty, the flag lying still at the top of the pole, while in here, Jesus is waiting for Judas to show up and betray him. Nenny puts her pencil in the sharpener and turns the handle, and then happens to glance at Mary’s face. A look passes there, a quick blink and a furrow of her brow.
Nenny glances at her teacher’s face and sees that the sharpening sound has made her lose her place. She thinks, Well, that was easy. She returns to her desk. The story drags on, it’s been the same story for years, a bag of silver and three rooster crows, and Nenny digs her pencil into the page and presses so hard it snaps again. She says, “Oops!” loud enough for everyone to hear. She rises and goes to the sharpener and waits for the look, waits for Mary’s irritation or scorn, anything, and understands, in some way, why Steve Smoot eats paper and Donnie Harlem is such a jerk all the time—anything to attract a gaze.
“Nenny?” Mary says, pausing the story. “Is everything okay?”
“My pencil keeps breaking.” Nenny’s standing at the sharpener and has no idea what’s happening inside her, but it’s a sour mix of disappointment and inertia and everything feeling locked. It’s a hateful, reckless thing, and she loves it. “This pencil is a piece of crap.”
There’s an audible intake of breath, and everyone is stunned. Katie Marion looks as though she’s been slapped. Obviously Nenny’s blurted stuff out before, but never a bad word, never like this—like stabbing something midair. Michelle Wynne puts her hand over her mouth and stifles a laugh.
“Nenny,” Mary warns.
Nenny shrugs. “What? It is.”
“Please return to your seat,” Sister says, with a sternness she’s never shown.
Look at that: Nenny’s made a nice nun mad.
* * *
Of course when the bell rings, Sister calls her name to stay behind. Nenny anticipated as much. Everyone else shuffles out, not even pretending not to stare. Nenny prepares herself for nun wrath—Old World, Cold War kind of nun wrath. Nun wrath is red-faced and blazing bloodshot eyes. In the movies, it’s a ruler to your knuckles or whips on your behind, but it’s 1989 and that kind of barbarism simply doesn’t fly anymore. Now nun wrath is fifty Hail Marys or having to recite the Apostles’ Creed at the front of the room, which they’re all supposed to know by heart but no one does. It’s thrusting the hall pass into your hands and telling you to “March,” and you don’t have to be told where to go. It’s sitting in Mother Superior’s office, your legs swinging, your shoes knocking against the chair. It’s Mother Superior getting Mother More Superior on the phone. “Nenny,” she says, that one word enough. The message is crystal clear: Knock it off. There’s a time and a place, and Sacred Heart school is neither of those.
But nun wrath is not what Mary delivers. Instead, she pulls a desk close to Nenny’s and sits.
“Shall we talk?” Mary says. She doesn’t seem angry anymore. Nenny doesn’t know what to do, so she just shrugs. A talk is not what she expected. A lecture, maybe, but not a talk, desks close and everyone else outside.
“How are you? Is everything okay?” And Nenny thinks, No, things are definitely not okay, but can’t bear to look at Mary because her anger, her defiance, have dissolved in the dust-specked room. There’s no way to articulate any of it, how horrible things are, how much she misses Mom, how small and invisible she feels, so she shrugs again, a little shoulder bounce.
Mary doesn’t press for an answer, just nods. She has her hands folded on the desk. If this were a movie, her hands would be soft and elegant, with little pink fingernails. But this isn’t a movie, it’s real life, and Sister’s hands are bumpy and rough like a man’s hands. A small scar runs the length of her forefinger. It’s hard not to notice that scar.
“What’s that?” Nenny asks, though questions about scars and things are rude. When she was seven, there was a man at the mall who did not have a nose, just a hole in his face where his nose should have been. When Nenny pointed, Mom slapped her hand and pulled her into the bathroom at Macy’s. “Why would you do that? Why would you be so rude?” she said, shaking Nenny by the arm. And it was so sudden, so strange, Mom so angry that it might as well have been a hole in her own face, her own parts missing or deformed. Nenny did not know then—who knows if she even knows it now?—that there’s a distinction between curiosity and cruelty, though the space between them is slight.
This feels different, though. If the man at the mall had been sitting with her in a quiet room, asking how things are, she probably could have asked about his nose. Why a noseless man would be sitting with her is beside the point. The point is, she could have asked.
Sister Mary holds her finger up and peers at it, as if only now remembering the scar is there. “A can opener,” she says. “I took the knife part out to open a can—I was quite young—and schlip!” She makes a motion with her other hand and laughs. “My father was very mad.”
Mary looks up from her hand and out the window and says, out of nowhere, “You know what I do when I’m sad?” She looks back at Nenny then and nods, like Yep, even nuns get sad. “I do this little exercise. I look around at people on the street and imagine that God is living in each of them. I think, God is that woman walking her dog. God is that woman with a cane. God is that angry little boy.” Mary points at her imaginary crowd. “God is him, and God is him, and God is her. And then, when I am at my most sad”—she closes her eyes, lays her hands on her chest, takes a deep breath—“I think, God is here too. Right here.”
She sits like that for a few long seconds, breathing and with her hands folded on her chest, but when she opens her eyes, she must see the skepticism on Nenny’s face, because she sighs and says, “Okay. That’s probably enough talking for today. You can go play.”
But no. Nenny remains glued to her seat, her eyes fixed on the desk, and doesn’t say anything, just stays where she is.
“No? You want to stay?”
Nenny doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t not nod either, and what occurs to her then could break your heart, if only a little: Sister Mary is not robotically rattling her name off roll, and she’s not scolding Nenny in front of the class. She’s not calling her Nelly by mistake, not shaking her head and saying, “You think it’s funny? So funny to be a clown?” Instead, she’s sitting in an empty classroom with Nenny, trying to show her where God lives. That he lives.
Hot tears collect on the ledges of Nenny’s eyelids, and Sister says nothing but lays one hand, one perfectly deformed hand, across Nenny’s back. Recess goes on for a long while, it seems, all the other kids yelping and hollering outside.
Exercise
IMAGINE GOD as recently divorced. He sleeps sprawled on the couch, one arm slung over his face, snoring like a broken machine. In the morning, God wakes in his shorts and rubs his eyes, his face sleep-dented and grooved. He goes into the kitchen and stands at the sink, his grip white at its edge, grimacing because pain is blitzing his spine. Imagine that’s God making breakfast, aching with every ounce to be cheerful for your sake, to ignore the agony in his spine.
Or Go
d is your best friend, and she lives with her mother in 3G. God is just nine years old, and already she’s got a solid grasp on things. When you walk with God to Thrifty’s after school, she does an impression of Alf that’s so spot-on you almost burst from laughing, steadying yourself against a stone wall while all the jerks driving by slow down to stare. God is the only person you know who orders pecan praline ice cream.
Or God is your best friend’s mother, who teaches first grade at a public school forty-five minutes away—with traffic, an hour or more. When God’s husband left, she took her daughter to live in the mountains, because she thought it’d be good for her, all that fresh mountain air. Once they got there, though, God found there was no work, really, so she took a job at a diner called Lou’s, worked the late shift, and prayed nothing would happen to her kid, alone in some creaky mountain house. Now, when she comes home from work, God sits in her car and leans the seat all the way back, and stays like that for a long time, listening to the afternoon shows on NPR.
Or God is your little brother, and he squirms in his chair when he has to poop. He watches Pee-wee’s Playhouse from his blanket fort and says “please” like “pweas.” One day he tells Boots about Manny—“Manny Hernandez, one time he caughted a owl, and he put it in a box, and the owl laided three eggs, but in the morning there was only two eggs, even though Manny putted a big rock on the lid”—and Boots listens and nods because she’s not related to him and also because Boots is nice. “Where does Manny live?” she asks, and God blinks and kind of shakes his head. “He doesn’t live nowhere,” somewhat impatiently, as though it’s her question and not his answer that doesn’t make sense.
Or God is Bubbles, who eats cold hot dogs dipped in sour cream and pours ketchup on his mac and cheese. He takes the wheels off his bike just to stare at the spokes, makes a battery out of a potato, looks confounded when he ties his shoes. He wants an electric drill for his birthday.
Or God is Mr. Wilder in 6G, who smokes on his porch and has a cat named Pushkin. Or Mrs. Carter, whose husband works overseas. The Garcia boys, chalk-drawing robots and spaceships in the parking lot when they get home from school. The couple who lives at the end of the building, him with a wild grey moustache and her with tattoos running down her arms like sleeves. Or maybe Mr. Baldy: imagine God is Chuck Baldy, with a paunch like a great big pillow under his shirt and probably—though it’s difficult to fathom—a good reason for still not cleaning the pool. Or Leonard, with all his bottles and cans.
Or this, try this: imagine God is you. Nenny lies in the bathtub and submerges her head up to her ears and lets her hands float numbly at her sides. She listens to the muted thrum of the world underwater and does as Mary suggested, which is to imagine that God occupies a space inside her. She breathes deep, as Mary did, her body gently buoyed with each breath, and stays like that a long time. A warmth begins to spread through her like light, and she lets it be, does not question or disrupt it, and something happens then, something arrives, a new feeling like crawling back from somewhere far away.
Hail Mary
FRIDAY, THE third grade’s day for confession. Nenny finds a pew near the back of the church and folds the kneeler down. On Sundays it’s impossible to concentrate, so many people and so much noise, itchy tights and pinching shoes, Tiny rolling around like a bug in the pew—but on Fridays she sometimes feels as though she is all alone. She takes out her rosary to pray, then closes her eyes.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women—but how many women? Nenny suddenly thinks, and her hands go numb on the beads. Without meaning to, she pictures Windsor that last day in the van. Improbably, but beautifully, she’s wearing her belly-dancing clothes: a long green-gold skirt billows in the wind coming through the window, the sun catching on a belt of coins. The dusty, ancient smell of a Catholic church, but in all that silence and echoing, it’s hard—impossible—not to think of the desert in midday, a sandaled foot pressing pedals to the floor. Here is a thing that Nenny is only now beginning to learn, an inglorious lesson to take with her for her whole life: if a person you know or sort of know dies, you fixate on the most minor, insignificant things. What was the last thing she ate? The last thing she said? The last thing she saw? Was there a song playing on the radio that day in the van? Nenny’s mind flashes to the song she heard in the car with Rick: He rich. Is he rich like me? The echoes from other pews. If a person dies in a movie, they see their whole life flash before them—births, weddings, sunrises, a kid on a swing—but is that really true? How would anyone know? The only people who know that are already—Hail Mary. Nenny can’t help it: she thinks of Windsor thinking of her babies, their tiny hands, their hair soft as down, and something snags and claws inside her. In those final moments, what are the things that matter most? What are the things that bind you when you are terribly, irrevocably bound?
Hail Mary, full of grace.
Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary.
When Someone Dies
SATURDAY MORNING at Mom’s there’s an illustrated book on the coffee table called When Someone Dies, by Laura Hofstader, PhD. It’s just sitting there as if it waltzed in of its own accord or (Look at that!) fell from the sky, but everyone knows it’s Mom’s doing. They all must see it when they come downstairs—sitting in the middle of the coffee table like a brick—but no one mentions it. Mom cooks eggs and hash browns and doesn’t say a word. Rick is quiet too, which leads Nenny to believe that he’s in on it somehow. Who knows? Maybe one of the kids will pick it up? Gain a little unforced, subtle insight into this haunting, foreboding thing called death. By the end of breakfast, the book’s presence is like a low hum coming from the other room. Midmorning, the hum has become a thrum. A raucous shout by the end of the afternoon. Nenny can’t stand it anymore. She snatches the book from the table and locks herself in the bathroom upstairs with it.
“All living things, including animals and bugs and people,” begins Laura Hofstader, PhD, “die.” Death is a part of life, hard as it is to understand. “Where do dead people go?” Many people believe that when we die it’s just our bodies that die, that there’s another part of us that lives forever, “our spirit or our soul.” Something about a broken glass of water but the water still remains. Honestly, Nenny’s not really paying attention anymore. She flips to the back. There’s a list addressed to parents there (“Be honest. Encourage questions. Allow yourself to cry.”), which feels conspicuous and lame, like grown-ups talking about you in the third person even though you’re standing right there. She tucks the book back under her shirt and returns it to the table downstairs.
Mom is in the kitchen, cutting vegetables at the sink. Nenny looks at her back, the unwashed, matted aspect of her hair. Laura Hofstader, PhD, failed to mention something else, something crucial, this: what it means to be the parent of a child whose other parent has died. Nenny goes to Mom and hugs her from behind, arms around her waist and cheek pressed into her back, and feels what all creatures, at some point, must feel: to swallow and be swallowed, to eat what you love whole.
Bundle
THE NEXT day, just before dinner, the strangest thing happens—Gabe shows up. Or maybe “strange” is not the word. Maybe the word does not exist.
Mom’s cooking and Kat has volunteered to help, which is common practice these days. Kat offers to help, she doesn’t talk back anymore, she doesn’t snort or roll her eyes, her outfits have toned down, sweatshirts and jeans and no makeup at all—and she acts like it’s no big deal, like it’s been like this all along, when in fact there’s not a single one of them who hasn’t
noticed the change and felt it for what it is, which is seismic and a little frightening. If losing her mother could so transform Kat, and in such a cosmically minuscule amount of time, how would a similar loss transform each of them? It’s scary to think of what you are, what you might or might not become.
“Do you like cooking?” Mom asks Kat. She’s at the counter, chopping onions, and talks to Kat in this formal, investigatory way, like trying to find common ground with some stranger who appears in your kitchen one day.
“I think so. I might take home ec next semester with Leah.”
When the doorbell rings, everyone’s in their place, like in a play: Rick’s watching the news in the den and Charles is slumped near him in a beanbag chair, a comic held close to his face; Mom and Kat are in the kitchen, bonding or whatever; Nenny’s at the table, trying to read; and Tiny and Bubbles are both upstairs, doing who knows what.
The doorbell rings and Rick mutes the TV. He says, “Got it,” as though expecting someone, though of course he’s not. He opens the door and says something like “Hey, there” or “How are you?” in a way that is reserved and a little slow, a way that, even from where she’s sitting at the table, Nenny can tell means it’s not a neighbor or a friend.
Gabe looks utterly destroyed. His cheeks look carved, as if someone’s worked away too furiously at unstable stone. At Rick’s invitation he comes in and stands at the entrance to the dining room, seeming underfed and confused. He carries a big blue bundle in his arms.
“These are some things,” he starts to say, before Charles steps out from the TV room to see who it is. In quick succession Charles’s mouth drops open and then closes again, his jaw sets and his eyes turn to steel, and then he stomps upstairs to his room and slams the door. Gabe’s eyes follow him dully.
Every Other Weekend Page 15
