Vinegar Hill

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Cheater,” Amy hisses.

  Abruptly, just inches above Mary-Margaret’s head, Eliza and Missy appear. They thrash the air with their wings. Their tiny pink mouths are open; their sharp white teeth are fierce. They tell Amy, She will pay.

  “What are you staring at?” Mary-Margaret says.

  That night after supper, Amy goes to her room and writes about angels in her journal. Without a guardian angel to protect you, there is no hope for you in this world, for only a guardian angel can see the secret things, the terrible things, that hide within every second. Say that you are walking down the street, and suddenly you feel you have to cross to the other side, you must cross to the other side, and so you do. Because that’s your guardian angel looking out for you, and if you don’t listen, a car could run up on the sidewalk where you were standing and squash you flat. Or say that someone is telling you a lie, and nothing about their face shows they are saying anything but the truth, but you know they are lying anyway, and you smile at them because you don’t know what else to do. You don’t need a Magic Eight Ball if you have a guardian angel. You already can feel all the answers to questions that can be answered yes or no.

  She looks up to see Ellen watching her from the doorway.

  “Homework?” Ellen says.

  “We have to keep a journal.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Not really.”

  “Then would you mind giving Bertie a bath? I’d like to go for a walk.”

  “Where to?”

  “Nowhere in particular. You don’t mind putting yourself and your brother to bed?”

  Amy constructs a careful face. “I don’t mind,” she says. She doesn’t ask if she may go along, because Ellen will come up with an excuse why she can’t.

  “Thank you,” Ellen says formally, and Amy realizes her mother’s face is as carefully constructed as her own. When she goes into the living room to fetch Bert, Ellen is already wearing James’s big overcoat, her mouth and nose hidden by a scarf. She says, “See, Amy’s here to give you a bath. I’ll be back soon, Honey, I’ll come and kiss you good night.”

  “No,” Bert says. “Stay.”

  He is curled up on the couch, small and neat as a cork. Beside him, James is wrapped in a quilt. “Don’t you start now,” he says to Bert, who is sniffling behind his thumb.

  “Little sissy boy,” Mary-Margaret says.

  “Don’t go,” Bert says, and he begins to cry.

  “Bertie, I’ll be right back. I’m just going for a short walk.”

  “Hasenfuss,” Mary-Margaret teases. “Mama’s boy.”

  Fritz turns to James. “Jimmy, do we got to listen to this every goddamn night?”

  “Herbert, that’s enough!” James says harshly.

  “Bertie, I’ll be right back, okay?”

  “It’s you who’s making him cry like that,” James says to Ellen.

  “I’m not making him do anything.”

  “It’s you who’s his mother,” James says. “How come you want to leave him like this?”

  “Because it’s the only way I can get any time for myself around here!” Ellen says. “You’re his father, even if you don’t act like it. For once, you take some responsibility.”

  “I’m sick,” James says. “I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

  “I expect…help,” Ellen says. She gestures at Amy’s grandparents. “I married you, not them,” she shouts. “I didn’t sign up to be anybody’s servant!—Bert, please,” she says.

  Herbert howls.

  “Christ, Jimmy!” Fritz says. “She don’t like it here, she is free to find somewhere else.”

  Amy steps forward and grabs Bert’s hands. “C’mon, I’ll get your water ready,” she says and she tows him, still crying, into the bathroom. She closes the door and turns on the water, so the voices from the living room sound only like the echoes of voices. As soon as he hears the sound of the water, Bert stops crying and pulls down his pants to pee.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Amy says.

  “No, she’s not,” Bert says. He finishes, and steps out of his pants, dripping. “She’s going to get bit by a dog with rabies. She’s going to die and never come back.”

  “Arms up,” Amy says, and Bert lifts his arms so she can pull off his shirt. She breathes in the boy-smell that comes off his body. If only he believed in angels…but she has tried many times to make him understand, to show him Eliza and Missy, to prove to him that her own guardian angels are powerful enough to protect them all. But I don’t see any angels, Bert says. You’re not supposed to see them, Amy explains, you just have to know.

  “Ask me a question,” Amy says. “Ask me any question that can be answered yes or no.”

  Bert gets into the bathtub, squats, bobs his bottom in and out of the water, getting used to the temperature. “Is Mom coming back?”

  “Very definitely,” Amy says. She gets a washcloth and rubs warm circles over his back, scratching around his shoulder blades until he straightens up and makes them stick out. Wings, Ellen calls them.

  “Wings,” Amy says.

  “You don’t know,” Bert says sadly. “You think you know, but you don’t. Only God knows if something’s yes or no.”

  There’s a scratch at the door, and James comes in, the quilt hanging from his waist like a colorful skirt. “What’s going on?” he says.

  “Shut the door,” Amy says, “there’s a draft,” but James just stands there, staring at Bert’s small body, at his penis which is curled and pink as a shrimp.

  “Dunk your head,” Amy says to Bert.

  “Aren’t you getting too old to let your sister see you naked?” James says.

  “Shut the door,” Amy says again, and this time James obeys.

  “A big boy like you,” James says.

  Amy rubs shampoo into Bert’s baby-fine hair. His head falls back against her hands, his eyes close. His neck moves loosely, and he makes a soft, contented sound.

  “A big boy your age,” James says.

  They ignore him. He paces the two steps between the frosted window and the door, dragging the quilt through small puddles of water. He coughs, wipes his eyes.

  “It’s awful to be sick like this,” he says, and he peers at himself in the mirror. Amy cups warm water over Bert’s hair; he giggles when it runs into his ears. Go away, you will go away now, Amy thinks as hard as she can, but it is several more minutes before James wanders out, leaving the door open behind him. Amy closes her eyes and sees her mother walking through the darkness, arms pumping, moving faster and faster until she lifts off the sidewalk and into the wide night sky, far away from Amy.

  Amy tucks Bert into bed just like her mother would, saying the same bedtime prayer, kissing him on the same place beneath his chin. Then she gets into her own bed, leaving the lamp on the nightstand glowing, and writes in her journal. Perhaps there is no God or perhaps all of us together make up God, but with a guardian angel you don’t need anyone but yourself, and soon, if you pay attention, you don’t even need your guardian angel anymore. The angel kisses you good-bye and moves on to someone else, perhaps another girl or an old man or even a cat or a dog, because angels can’t tell the difference. Angels can fall in love with anyone. Angels are the most beautiful things in the world.

  She stops writing, and reaches out to touch the lampshade, which is decorated with angels in long white gowns. For a brief moment she is lonely for Eliza and Missy, who used to sleep beside her every night.

  “Burning the midnight oil?” James says, and Amy whips her journal beneath the covers, because she did not see him, standing in the doorway, not exactly in or out of the room.

  “Yes,” Amy whispers, not wanting to wake Herbert. “Is Mom home yet?”

  “No,” James says. “I’m home.”

  “He doesn’t want you,” Amy says.

  James takes one step through the doorway. His shadow stretches high on the walls. “Let me tell you something,” he says. “It’s hell
having kids. Can you remember that?”

  Amy does not say anything.

  “Say it.”

  Herbert moans in his sleep.

  “It’s hell having kids,” Amy repeats.

  “Good,” James says. He runs his hands through his hair. His eyes are wet; he blots them with a tattered tissue. Amy doesn’t need Eliza and Missy to tell her how much he doesn’t want to be here, how much he wants to be wherever it is he goes when Amy forgets to think of him.

  They turn in their journals just before noon recess. When they come back inside thirty minutes later, cheeks bright with cold, Sister Justina greets them with an angry look which sweeps around the room until it descends upon Amy.

  “Amy Grier,” Sister Justina says, and her beautiful voice is filled with stones. “You will bring your journal to Father Bork. He is expecting you.”

  Amy takes the journal from Sister Justina, gets her coat from her hook in the hall, and walks across the street to Father Bork’s office. The office is in the living room of the priests’ house, which huddles against the side of the church. The housekeeper, Mrs. Hochmann, lets Amy in and ushers her with small, arthritic steps to the couch. Mrs. Hochmann is in her seventies and has been the parish housekeeper for over thirty years. The look on her face says she has seen all sorts come and go, but that undoubtedly Amy is something worse. She tries to take Amy’s coat, but Amy clings to it firmly because she is terrified of Father Bork, just as all the girls are terrified of Father Bork. There are stories that he pulls girls’ dresses up to spank them, and although Ellen says that’s all garbage, Amy waits on the couch with her coat buttoned up to her chin.

  When Father Bork comes in, he sits on the couch beside Amy without looking at her. He crosses his legs, folds his hands, and leans back into the cushions, as if he is planning to sit there for a long time. He fixes his lap with a gaze that is not angry, but very sad.

  “Do you know what this is about?” he murmurs to Amy after several minutes have passed. His deep voice sounds as if it has been broken beyond repair.

  Amy places the journal gingerly between them. “This, I guess.”

  “You guess,” he says. He makes no move to touch it. “Do you know why what you have written here is wrong?”

  “I thought I could write about whatever I wanted.”

  “It sounds here as though you think you are God. It sounds here as if you think you know things other people—older grown-up people—do not. And it admits that you have a Magic Eight Ball.”

  “It isn’t mine.”

  “Whose is it?”

  Amy does not say anything.

  “I’m not angry,” Father Bork says, and he fingers the journal, stroking it lightly. “But I am concerned. Think of how you are hurting God. Think of how much He loves you, yet look at the pain you are causing Him.”

  Father Bork puts the journal on the coffee table and drapes his arm around Amy. He’s going to spank me, Amy thinks. He’s going to lift my dress. She calls out to Eliza and Missy, Emergency! Emergency! but they do not appear.

  “What I’d like to do is offer you the sacrament of confession. Just tell me you are sorry, and God will forgive you everything.”

  Amy imagines Eliza and Missy, their yellow gowns, their white, sharp teeth. If you imagine something hard enough, you can make it happen. But nothing happens, nothing at all. She is alone with Father Bork, sitting beside him on a couch that smells of cigarettes, his arm like a boa constrictor, squeezing her to his flickering tongue.

  “Can you say, ‘I am sorry, Lord, for my grievous sins’?”

  Amy bursts into tears.

  “Well, that’s good enough,” Father Bork says. “For your penance say four Hail Marys and contemplate humility. Then take what you have written and throw it into the trash. I absolve thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Can you say Amen?”

  “Amen,” Amy whispers, hating everything.

  After Father Bork lets her go, Amy does not return to her class as she has been told to do. She starts to walk home, but then she remembers Bert: how will he get home without her? It’s an hour and a half before school lets out, and it’s too cold to stay outside for that long. If she goes back into the school to wait, a hall monitor will find her and take her to Sister Justina. Amy has no choice but to enter the shelter of Saint Michael’s Church, to dip her fingers in the holy water, to genuflect out of habit. She sits in the very last pew, hands tucked into her pockets as if they are hiding there.

  9

  For the past few months, Ellen has been waking at night, rigid with terror, afraid of her own death. The first time it happened she thought the feeling was something that would pass, like a bad cramp or a headache. She curled herself against James’s silent body, nose pressed into the hollow between his shoulder blades. Angel’s wings, she called those bones when she was a little girl. Her sister Julia could make them stick out at will, and with her wispy blond hair and wide eyes, she looked just like the paintings of angels at the front of Mom’s old Bible. Ellen inhaled James’s musty smell, and suddenly the thought of those angels horrified her. Dead people, dressed in white, floating through the air like dust. Toothless. Graceful. Bony fingers reaching for her throat.

  The next time she woke in the night, she had dreamed of the angel of death. The angel looked like Julia with her feeble pink wings, but when she opened her mouth to speak, Ellen saw two eyes shining from within the depths of her throat and knew she had come to drag her from her life. She sat up in bed, turned on the light, and those eyes dissolved into the air. That night, she was glad James was away, afraid her skin might crumble at the slightest touch, and instead of blood and guts and bone what would ooze from her would be dust.

  Tonight she wakes up because she dreamed that she has died. As she lies beside James, breathing hard, she can still feel her bones being drained of calcium, the cells in her organs sloughing away, her very self dissolving. Just before he died, her father made a dollhouse for Ellen and her sisters, and after he finished it he carved a doll to look like each of them. He began with Miriam, the oldest; he had just finished Julia when he died, so Ellen was the only one who didn’t have a doll. Still, she loved to look through the windows of that dollhouse and into the perfectly ordered rooms, where each doll was frozen before her single task, washing the dishes, ironing the clothes, making the beds, her feet held in place by tiny silver nails. In her dream, Ellen peered through the dollhouse windows and saw a figure carved to look like her. Delighted, she tried to reach for it, but her arms would not move, and she realized she was the doll, lifeless, an empty husk.

  She gets up, puts on her robe, and goes down the hall to the kitchen. By now she has learned the secret sounds that the house makes after midnight—the hum of the refrigerator, the settling of the floorboards in front of the sink, the scratch of the crab apple tree against the window when the wind blows—and she senses she isn’t alone even before she turns on the light. Amy is sitting at the kitchen table with her head buried in the crook of her arm. Her hair is unbraided, tangled against the back of her neck. She lifts her head, blinks sleepily.

  “Honey,” Ellen says, the nightmare fading. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s good for your back to sleep sitting up. I read it in a book.”

  “Does your back hurt?” Ellen says, and she rubs Amy’s bony shoulders.

  “No,” Amy says.

  “Would you like some warm milk?” Ellen says. “Milk has vitamins. That’s good for a strong back too.”

  “I guess.”

  Ellen takes two cups from the cupboard and heats a pan of milk, grateful to have something to do with her hands. She knows she hasn’t been spending time with either of the children the way she used to—inventing weekend projects, poring over their assignments from school. She just doesn’t seem to have the energy anymore; she is tired, short-tempered, her mind always wandering. Six months ago, she would have simply taken Amy into her arms, asked her what was wrong, and Amy wou
ld have told her. Now she often feels awkward with Amy; Amy has pulled away from her, keeping secrets, telling occasional lies.

  At work, she has been tired too, and the students are starting to notice. She finds herself blowing up in the classroom over little things that, once, she would have laughed at. Mrs. Grier is a crab, she heard a little boy say on the playground, and the circle of children standing around him nodded their heads like a small, fierce jury. “They’re vultures,” Barb said affectionately, when Ellen told her about it over lunch one day. “They start to circle the minute they sense that something’s wrong.”

  Ellen stirs the milk, and the skin sticks to the rough wooden spoon. She has always been a skillful teacher, a good mother. She doesn’t understand why that has changed, why lately she isn’t interested in anything anymore.

  “I got in trouble today at school,” Amy finally says.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “They didn’t like my journal. Sister sent me to Father Bork, and he made me take confession.”

  “He made you take confession?” Ellen brings the cups of milk to the table, sets them down, and sits in the rocking chair by the window. “Confession is supposed to be voluntary. What didn’t they like about your journal?”

  Amy gets the journal from her book bag by the door and gives it to Ellen, shivering in her bare feet and thin nightgown. “Here, come sit with me,” Ellen says quickly, and Amy crawls up onto her lap, even though she is way too big and her legs spill over to the floor. It feels good to hold her this way. When Amy was a very little girl, she sat on Ellen’s lap every night, and Ellen read aloud to her, book after book, until one day they discovered Amy had learned how to read. Now Ellen reads silently, turning page after page.

  She remembers her own magical games she played at ten, at twelve, bringing the cows back up the lane for milking, never letting Number Seven take the lead because her bright white face meant bad luck. Her sisters, too, had their rituals. The toes of Gert’s shoes met beneath her bed at night so Gert would never be lonely. Ketty wore her hair twisted into a bun on test days. Even Mom had her own beliefs: on holidays, an extra place at the table was set just in case someone (a guest? a spirit?) stopped by.