Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  And now that was gonna be me. I couldn’t believe it. How could I stand still? I filled out my form with all my dates and info, and then I watched Christy fill out hers.

  She was leaning over a counter against the far wall, scribbling. Her butt looked even better now that she was putting on a little weight. Her skin was too pale, though, and her eyes had been looking tired. All this traveling had been taking its toll on her. She sensed me staring at her and turned around, looking up. She had a little pimple on the corner of her chin that was cherry red, and I watched her try to hide it by bringing her hand up.

  And then boom, as if I’d been hit in the gut with a baseball bat, I thought I’d be sick to my stomach. The air deflated out of me. There on her page right underneath my name was that cocksucker’s name, Alexander Shelberger: her first husband.

  Motherfucker.

  “Oh, shit, why you gotta write his name there?” I asked, scowling. Literally all the electrons and neutrons or whatever in my limbs had stopped dead.

  “What do you mean?” She looked at me, nervous and scared. As a pregnant person she had become exceedingly emotional.

  “I mean, that sucks.” I was trying not to be mean. “That does somethin’ bad to the air, you know? I don’t like that.” In some ways I’m very possessive, and the thought of him, combined with the idea that she might’ve stood in a line just like this with someone else, made me hold my stomach like I would literally regurgitate. I knew about this guy; he was a rich kid from Christy’s hometown named Alex but everyone called him Tripp (because he was Alexander Shelberger the Third), but denial seemed to be the best way to deal with his presence. He was the main reason Christy refused to have a civil wedding, because that’s what they had done. He was also the root, I figured, of her reluctance to get married in the first place.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked again, her face totally devoid of color.

  “I forgot you were married before.” I paused, suddenly unsure about how big a deal I should make out of this. “It’s just a real bummer, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, still as a stone. There was a long silence before she spoke again. “I never loved him, you know that. It wasn’t a marriage; I was trying to get him to go to rehab. I wish I hadn’t done it; he was a mean disgusting human being. But it’s my past, OK?”

  Once when I helped Christy move apartments we found all these photos of her and Tripp, grainy arty pictures that he’d taken. She got so depressed, a black cloud covered the air around her and her limbs looked as if they weighed ten million pounds.

  “Old pictures of people not in your life anymore . . . it’s just so sad,” I remember her saying. “Times that were important to you, that you were invested in, and now you feel nothing.” She had looked at me hollowly. “It makes you wonder if the moment you are living now will be any different.” Then she dumped a shoe box full of photos into a big green plastic garbage bag.

  “What are you gonna say about me in ten years?” I asked her now, quietly and sincerely, staring at my bootlaces as I shuffled across the brown city-hall-linoleum floor. “That you were pregnant and out of your mind?”

  “I hope not,” she said simply, not averting her eyes. Her short hair was held back in a silver barrette. “I don’t want to get married, Jimmy. It’s not something I’m dying to do. It’s not interesting to me to be married. I want a family, I believe in the two of us, I would like to marry you, but if you don’t want to, then screw it.”

  She was going on the offensive. She’s good at that. When she gets mad at me I always start apologizing, but when I get mad at her she’s like boom boom—two straight to the jaw. She doesn’t take any shit.

  “I married Tripp”—she whispered his name—“because the douche bag told me he’d kill himself if I didn’t, and I was so young and stupid I believed him. I was divorced before I was twenty, OK? Every time he said the word wife it was like someone jabbed a fork into my shoulder, but if it does something bad to the air”—she scowled—“well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just a buzz kill,” I offered, shrugging my shoulders.

  “Well, grow up. What do you want me to do?” she asked, exasperated.

  “Don’t ever do this with anyone else again,” I said, giving a fake smile.

  “Jimmy. . . .” You could see how tense she was in the sad tight way she was holding her mouth. “That’s the idea.”

  When I’d walked into city hall I’d felt thirty feet high, godlike, large, and thundering, but now I was disoriented, small, whiny, and fragile. The idea hit me so ferociously, and perhaps for the first time: What if she doesn’t love me the way I love her? Oh, my God. What if she isn’t sincere? I looked around at the collection of sullen betrothed faces milling around us. Of course, nothing is forever.

  We sat down at a small desk on these beige swivel chairs in front of a young overweight female government employee who started processing our material. Christy didn’t have her divorce documents, so there were these ridiculous calls to the New York State record board for verification. It was kind of like being in the checkout lane at the supermarket and having the clerk get on the PA asking for the price of herpes ointment.

  “And you’re taking your husband’s name?” the woman asked Chris, in a flat midwestern accent.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

  “Yes,” she answered, and spelled it out: “H-E-A-R-T-S-O-C-K. I’ll keep Walker as a middle name.”

  I know it’s not important, and if I make too big a deal out of it you’ll think I’m some kind of macho asshole, but pride swelled in my heart, man; I won’t deny it. Christy Heartsock. I loved the sound.

  “We’re gonna be a family,” she said, without looking at me. “Don’t be a prick about me having been married before. Unfortunately, the past doesn’t go anywhere. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get us on firm ground. You understand me?”

  I nodded, trying to be cool.

  “Nobody’s making us do this; it’s something I want. Do you want it?”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “Now just one more thing.” The heavy woman leaned over her desk and spoke quietly. “It’s just a formality. Y’all aren’t related, are you?”

  I was back, ten feet tall and smiling.

  INVITATIONS

  From the bed inside the Millstream Motor Inn, I did it: I invited my father to my wedding. Bright hot sun was bleeding through the natty brown curtains, it was only eight-thirty in the morning, but it was now or never. I’d been thinking about calling him ever since the faint blue line appeared on my pregnancy test two months earlier, and finally right then and there I reached into my bag, took out my little red date book, looked under D for Dad, and called him. My hands shake whenever I call my father. I could barely punch in all the buttons on the motel phone. “Good morning, fear,” I said to myself. “You are my oldest friend.”

  Inside my date book, along with receipts and other odds and ends and folded up eight times into a small square, was a note my father gave me when I was ten years old.

  Seven Rules for a Princess

  on the tenth anniversary of the birth of my daughter

  Christy “Beetle Bomper” Walker

  1. Never announce to anyone that you are a princess. You know it and, if you behave as one, in time they will know it.

  2. Never pretend you are not a princess in an attempt to lessen yourself because you deem it will make others more comfortable. You show others the most respect by offering the best of yourself.

  3. A princess knows that success is most easily measured by how one handles disappointments.

  4. A princess is never so arrogant as to think she has nothing left to learn. As much as you like to be heard and understood, so does everyone else. The more you learn, the more intelligent you are. It’s that simple.

&nb
sp; 5. There is no such thing as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in regard to anything significant. Make time your ally. A princess understands the value of patience.

  6. A princess is not frivolous. She seeks the just, the compassionate, and the wise. When she finds it she protects it. It is never a bad idea to be your own hero.

  7. Above all a princess cherishes honesty. Hiding, shading, manipulating, or controlling the truth is a waste of everyone’s time. The truth exists with or without our acknowledgment. If the truth is unclear, silence is often a useful tool.

  What always bothered me about this letter my father wrote was that these princess principles were based on the assumption that he was a king. If you knew my father, it would annoy you too.

  Frank Steven Walker had two passions: politics and baseball. As a young man he played minor league ball for five years and then managed the Fort Worth Cats for three years, which led him into local politics. He won his first election to the State House of Representatives easily and served for eighteen years before moving on to become a deputy mayor. People loved my father, especially the ladies. He’s tall, with big broad shoulders and a large gap between his front two teeth, but more than anything else he’s disarmingly confident. He never touched alcohol or smoked a cigarette in his life; his only vice, he would say, was crazy women. He knew LBJ, he shook hands with John Kennedy the day he was shot, and in my limited experience as a child he seemed like one of the most important people in the world.

  The phone rang three times before my father answered.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said, holding the phone so tight against my head I was hurting my ear, “it’s me.”

  I could almost see my father sit down.

  “Something big is happening, Daddy,” I whispered. “Something wonderful.”

  FATHER MATTHEW

  The door was open, but I knocked anyway. You gotta knock.

  My intended course of action was to have Father Matthew marry us. He was the priest who’d confirmed me and definitely the holiest guy I’d ever come across. The last time I saw him was when he buried my old man, which everyone appreciated. Suicide makes a lot of folks uneasy. He had a stern serious face, but you could make him laugh, no problem—make a fart noise in your armpit and he’d bust a gut. He was our youth group leader, and he let us get away with smoking and all kinds of nutsy behavior as long as we were respectful of one another. Christy wasn’t Catholic but she was OK with the idea of him marrying us. Her only condition was we had to have the service at night, with lighted candles, but I figured Father Matthew would be hip to that.

  I went to visit the old priest in the church offices, which were directly underneath the main chapel. The cold, wet-stone smell of that church basement brought back ten thousand memories. I stood in the hallway outside his office, noticing how little had changed. His room was open and airy, with sunlight pouring in the one small high window. It was the kind of room where you can see lint and junk sprinkling the shafts of light like stardust. You felt awkward or clumsy if you moved too quickly. There were books everywhere, books stacked on top of books, ledgers piled in one corner you could tell were forty or fifty years old. Old mail was piled here and there, and Father Matthew was sitting at his heavy wooden desk staring up into space.

  He was still as big as I remembered. Some things get smaller as you get older, like the hill on Pecan Avenue where I grew up. I remember struggling to ride my bike up to the top, but now when I drive by it’s hardly a hill at all, more like an incline. But the old priest sat there, twisting his head around like he was looking for something on the ceiling, and his shoulders and arms were just as mammoth as I had remembered. Father Matthew Allen was probably six feet six inches tall. The palms of his hands were bigger than my face. I’m not joking, he was, like, a first-growth human being.

  “Come on in,” he said loudly, in a raspy Boston accent. We were in southern Ohio, and I bet this guy hadn’t been back to Massachusetts for fifty years, but he still sounded like Robert Kennedy.

  I went in. There was a thick oval rug in the center of the floor that was coiled in ropelike spirals going down smaller and smaller to the middle. That rug was older than anybody living in my family. It was gnarly and covered with foreign-looking hairs. I stepped on it and stood in front of him. When I was thirteen I thought he was ninety, so I had no idea what his age was now, but he was damn old.

  The word on him was he had been on intimate terms with several famous people—famous religious people, I should say, not celebrities. His eyes were the gigantic pale-blue eyes of death. When I was little I had this drippy idea that God used Father Matthew’s eyes as kind of a peephole, or outpost, like maybe God picked a few people every hundred or so miles to use for visual reconnaissance. Anyway, he confirmed me. Deacon Smith led our confirmation class and everything, but Father did the actual confirmation. I was stoned when it happened; it was a point of pride for me and my buddy Deke. We got it into our heads that we’d be baked for our confirmation and we were. We did our SATs baked too. Another shining moment in my history. When you’re reciting the Apostle’s Creed stoned and you peer into Father Matthew’s pale baby blues, you can sense that old guy manhandling every impure thought that ever embarrassed its way across your mind.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, holding my hands behind my back so as not to appear uncentered.

  “Are you?” he said, extremely loud. He must’ve gotten hard of hearing.

  “No, I guess not that sorry.” I smiled. Christy was outside in the car with the cat. They were listening to the radio and waiting for me.

  “Introduce yourself!” he shouted.

  “You want to know my name?” I asked, kind of devastated that he didn’t recognize me. You like to think you’re memorable.

  “Where are you from?” His voice was so loud I’m sure everyone in the adjacent church offices could hear us.

  “Originally? Or like where am I coming from recently?” I asked quietly, hoping our conversation would assume a more private tone.

  “Both!” he barked, rattling the panes of old glass in the window.

  “Well, originally I’m from here.”

  “That’s why I’m supposed to remember you.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Hmm.” He paused and fiddled at a dangling fold of skin hanging off his wrist. “And where are you coming from recently?”

  “I arrived from Albany a couple days ago.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Pardon?” I said. My gut was sinking. I understood how old he was now. He probably wouldn’t remember me even after I told him. Saint Patrick’s Holy Trinity Church of Cincinnati was a large congregation.

  “How did you transport yourself from Albany, New York, to Cincinnati, Ohio?”

  “I drove.”

  “You drove?” he responded, with a quickness that was unsettling. “What kind of car?”

  “A Chevy Nova.”

  “What year?

  “Nineteen sixty-nine.”

  “What year were you born?”

  “Nineteen sixty-nine.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, smacking his lips together, as if there were a peculiar significance to the symmetry of this information. I couldn’t be sure if he was looking at me or not. He had a walleye that made him look slightly confused. On his desk was a paperweight of a horse, a large galloping stallion. Father Matthew leaned over awkwardly, picked up the heavy paperweight, and moved it across his desk childishly, as if the horse were trotting over papers and pens onto his books.

  “And what do you do with yourself?” he asked, looking down at the paperweight.

  “For employment?” I couldn’t stop staring at the horse myself.

  He nodded.

  “I’m a sergeant in the U.S. Armed Forces.”

  “Marines?” His eyes peeked up hopefully.

 
“No, the army.”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked back down and set the horse aside. “It’s a difficult profession, the Armed Forces.”

  “Oh, well, I’m doing pretty good,” I said, shifting my weight, wishing he would ask me to sit but not wanting to presume I could.

  “You are?” he asked, tilting his head with suspicion. “You’re doin’ pretty good, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, then, God be praised,” he said calmly, but with an intensity that made me want to apologize.

  “So”—he cleared his throat—“your name is Jimmy Heartsock Junior, you’re almost thirty years old, you’re in the army, you’re doing great, but still you find it necessary to drive a 1969 Chevy Nova all the way home to come and visit the priest who confirmed you.”

  “You recognized me!” I was touched. This guy was probably the most legitimate person in my life. I vividly remember listening to his sermons, watching him break the bread during communion. He was powerful, commanding, and regal. On the downside, though, he was a shitty chanter. There’s that part in the mass where the officiate has to sing all the Latin creeds and prayers. Some of the deacons and other guys could do it so it sounded formal and reverent, but Father Matthew with his Boston accent was atrocious. It took him ages to get through one little passage.

  “Yes, I recognize you; you always smelled like smoke. You still smell like smoke. You should quit smoking!” he shouted, in a deep gravelly rattle.

  “I know I should, sir. “ I laughed. It felt so good to be recognized.