by Selena Kitt
“They can help Solie clean up,” Mr. Nolan replied, waving her and Donald away with a smile, leaning down to mock-whisper to Leah. “Which means they’ll get to eat all the leftover cake.”
They all laughed and Leah’s mother had relented, buttoning her coat and letting Donald lead her toward the door. They said their goodnights, and then Leah and Mr. Nolan were alone in the hallway right under those photographs of her and Erica doing cartwheels in the park as the big steel door closed.
They stood there, looking at each other, half-smiling. She didn’t want to break whatever little spell had been cast in the moment, but she was too afraid of what might happen if she didn’t.
“Thanks for the dance, Mr. Nolan,” she finally said.
“Thank you, Leah.” He kissed her forehead and turned to go back down the hall toward the party.
Things were in full swing when she got back to the living room. The adults were getting very drunk. Mayor Cobo was dancing with his wife, and Soupy Sales had people in stitches about something. Solie had little dessert trays set out with fruit and petit fours the servers kept refilling, but the busiest guy in the place was the bartender.
Leah didn’t see Mr. Nolan at all and she excused herself to go to the bathroom, leaving Erica talking to Father Michael. The hallway was dark, but she knew her way well enough, half expecting to find him back there, but she didn’t. She went into the bathroom, lifting both of her petticoats and holding them out of the way so she could pee.
She flushed and washed her hands, looking at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were ruddy from her encounter with Mr. Nolan—or maybe from her mother’s attempt to shame her for dancing with him. But why should she feel ashamed? Dancing itself wasn’t a sin. A knock on the door made her jump, and when the door opened, she realized she’d forgotten to lock it.
“Father Patrick!” She startled, her hand at her throat. “You surprised me!”
“Le-ahhhh!” Father Patrick raised a hand in greeting, his words slurred as he looked at her standing at the sink. “Beautiful Le-ahhhh! What a sight you are, lovely! Fetching dance you did back there, hmm?”
“Th—thank you...” Leah gave him a little smile, glancing behind him at the open door.
“Leah is a biblical name, did you know that?”
She nodded, watching him stumble further into the bathroom.
“The wife of Jacob.” Father Patrick shook his balding head, swiping one index finger over the other at her, a gesture of shame. “Did you know she shared her husband with her own sister, Rachel?”
Leah nodded, swallowing as she tried to edge past him, but he filled the doorway with his robes, a thick golden cross around his waist on a chain. She knew the biblical story of Leah and Rachel. Her mother had named her Leah right out of the Bible.
“They were all sluts back then you know.” His face spread into a grin, eyes glinting behind his thick, black framed glasses. “Shameful, brazen hussies!”
Leah cleared her throat. “Father Patrick, I think I should...”
“She snuck into his room at night, Leah did.” He leaned in and she could smell the booze on his breath as he lowered his voice to a mock whisper, as if he were telling her a secret. “She wanted him and snuck into his room and pretended to be his wife instead of her sister. And he impregnated her.”
She didn’t say anything to that, and he took another step closer. Leah’s instinct was to step back, but she didn’t. Instead she just stood there, gripping the edge of the sink, knowing Father Patrick wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning. That’s what she told herself when he bent his head to her ear and whispered into it.
“I shall lift your skirts as high as your face and show your nakedness to the nations, your shame to the kingdoms.”
Leah winced when he touched her. It was just his hand, covering hers on the edge of the sink, his palm warm and sweaty.
“Nahum… chapter three, verse five,” he told her.
“Father Patrick, I—”
“But it was Leah, not Rachel, who gave birth to Judah—and our Lord and Savior would ultimately come through the line of Judah. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t know that.”
She shook her head. “No.”
His finger moved over her skin, just one finger, tracing the slender curve of her hand resting on the edge of the sink.
“Watch and pray you may not enter into temptation,” he whispered. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
His face was very close, too close. Leah held her breath, not sure what was coming, what he could possibly be thinking. He wasn’t thinking of course, he was drunk. Just stupid drunk, that was all.
“The flesh is very, very weak...”
“Leah?” Erica! Thank God, it was Erica, coming down the hall to find her!
“Excuse me,” Leah murmured, daring to push past him, meeting Erica halfway down the hall.
“Everything all right?” Erica asked, watching as the bathroom door closed.
“Fine.” Leah grabbed her friend’s elbow, steering her toward the living room. She was still shaking on the inside, but she put on a smile, waving to Mr. Nolan as they rejoined the party. He was standing by his photograph, talking to the mayor.
Erica took her over to where Father Michael, who had brought his guitar in, was playing and singing. They stayed near him the rest of the night, until Father Patrick came over, even more drunk than he’d been earlier, and Father Michael excused himself to help his senior out to the car.
In the end, she and Erica didn’t help Solie clean up—Mr. Nolan told all the servers to go home and leave it until the next day, once everyone was gone—they just went to bed well after midnight. They were both so tired they could barely keep their eyes open by the time they’d put cold cream on their faces and slipped nightgowns over their heads and said their final nightly prayers.
Leah knew she should have been ashamed of the way she’d been dancing with Mr. Nolan that night. Clearly her mother thought so—and even the drunk Father Patrick! What in the world had possessed him? But she didn’t regret it. Like the biblical Leah who had snuck into Jacob’s bed, tempting her sister’s intended away, she found herself thinking of doing things just as wicked to get what she wanted.
She couldn’t help thinking about Mr. Nolan as she drifted off to sleep. She wondered if he was up there in his loft bed. Or maybe, just maybe, he’d slipped unnoticed into the darkroom underneath it, because Father Patrick was right—the flesh was very, very weak.
Still, she didn’t dare sneak out to look, not with the Pope out there, watching. And of course, God. He was watching too, all the time. She knew she would do well to remember that, but it wasn’t easy when the world was filled with so much temptation.
Chapter Six
Bobby Harris had a Candy Apple Red 1956 Ford T-Bird ragtop with black leather interior. It was brand new, cherry, jacked up and chrome-plated, and it could lay a patch and haul ass like nobody’s business in street races down Gratiot. At least, that’s what the boys all said, and Leah, being no automobile expert, wasn’t in any position to argue. She just knew the back of his Ford was roomy enough to hold four of them comfortably, six if they squeezed, while they cruised down Woodward the summer before.
March wasn’t prime cruising weather, but the first warm day hinting at spring and they went out anyway, Erica sitting close to Bobby on the bench seat up front, his class ring, along with the golden cross she’d inherited from her mother, hanging on a chain around her neck between her ample, sweatered breasts. Leah had a matching one, a gift from both of their mothers at their first communion. Leah and Bobby’s best friend, Chester “Buddy” Crenshaw and his girlfriend, Yvonne Livingston, were in the back. Leah was a fifth wheel, as usual, shivering even in her wool coat, ears bared by her ponytail and freezing in the whipping wind—it was only sixty-five degrees—but it didn’t matter.
The Everly Brothers were urging poor little Susie to wake up when they stopped at A&W (A and Dubs, they call
ed it) for root beer floats and a sack of burgers, seven of them for just a dollar. The boys ate most of them while the girls drank their floats and watched the car hops with their roller skates on, weaving in and out, serving other cars with fries and burgers and root beer. Winter was officially over.
The high school kids wore letterman’s jackets and drove beat-up jalopies, or their daddies’ Chevys if they were lucky enough to finagle the keys, and they all parked together at the back of the lot, the guys hopping from one car to the next like stunt men, walking tail fins and dropping like hormone-loaded bombs into backseats full of giggling, squealing girls. Leah watched, remembering high school, not so long ago, not really so different from Mary Magdalene’s.
Next year, when they chose “real colleges,” would bring the big change. Erica had her heart set on Vassar—Brown as a second choice—but Leah didn’t know if she would, or could, follow. Tuition was steep, and for Leah, whose widowed mother worked as a receptionist, a scholarship would be necessary. Bobby Harris had already been accepted to Yale. His stint at St. Casimir, Mary Magdalene’s sister college, the one for the boys, was just a formality, an excuse to stay home two more years and cruise in the car his daddy bought him for graduation.
Leah thought Catholic college was mostly just the church’s and their parents’ way of assuring the continuation of the faith and the species, giving boys and girls two more years to solidify those relationships they’d formed in high school, to choose mates and, for girls, to bide their time until their future husbands graduated with degrees that would assure they didn’t embarrass their rich fathers when they hired their sons to run and inherit whatever business had made them rich in the first place.
In her case, there was no rich daddy—she lived vicariously through Erica, with her Christian Dior dresses and trips to Hudson’s—and would likely be no rich husband. After this year, the bubble would burst. Erica would go to Vassar, Bobby to Yale. They would end up married, and it was likely they wouldn’t settle in Detroit but on the East Coast somewhere. Bobby’s father was in the railroad business, and his son could move anywhere and run it.
“Come on, let’s hit the ladies.” Erica tugged at Leah’s sleeve and Yvonne followed them into the restroom, where a dozen other girls were primping in the tarnished mirror over the sink.
Erica went into a stall but Yvonne went straight for the mirror, wedging her way in. Bobby had picked Leah and Erica up after their last class—for all Mary Magdalene’s insistence they were a college, their structure was far more high school—so they were still wearing their uniform skirts. Yvonne wasn’t Catholic and went to the Wayne State and wore a smart little jacket over her sweater. Her skirt was pencil thin and far shorter than Leah was used to, that was for sure.
“Oh damn, my pin broke.” Yvonne pouted, turning her bobbed head toward Leah. “Do you have a spare?”
“I might.” Leah opened her pocketbook, hunting through the bus passes and green pennies, finding a large safety pin at the bottom and handing it over. Erica was out of the stall, fighting for room at the sink to wash her hands.
“What are you doing?” Leah asked, eyes widening as she watched Yvonne rolling the top of her skirt, consequently shortening the hemline.
Yvonne took the pin from between her lips where she’d been holding it while she rolled her skirt, pinning the fabric in place.
“My mother measures the length of my skirt before I leave the house,” Yvonne explained, opening her pocketbook and pulling out a tube of lipstick. It was bright red and she painted her lips with it, peering over another girl’s shoulder. “So I roll it up and pin it while I’m out.”
“This girl is off the stick!” Erica gave Yvonne an admiring look. “Can I borrow that?”
Erica painted her lips bright red too, mashing them together before turning to Leah with a grin, holding out the lipstick tube. Leah shook her head and Erica shrugged, handing the lipstick back to Yvonne.
“So are you going to the passion pit with us this weekend?” Yvonne inquired, eyeing Leah in the mirror. This was the first time Leah had heard of it and when she glanced at Erica, she saw the guilty look on her face. The tension was broken when Yvonne turned to one of the girls on her left, a redhead wearing dungarees and some older boy’s Letterman jacket, having overheard her say, “I heard you can’t get pregnant the first time.”
“Try douching with Coke,” Yvonne said knowingly with a sage nod, patting the redhead on the shoulder. Leah noticed for the first time that the girl’s eyes were red from crying.
“A heating pad works, my cousin tried it,” another girl piped up.
“Jumping jacks,” Erica interjected. “And pepper. It makes you sneeze. A lot.”
Leah just listened, wide-eyed, as the other girls began listing ways to end an unwanted pregnancy, ending with a horror story about someone’s friend’s cousin’s girlfriend who had paid someone to “take care of it” with a coat hanger in some back alley clinic.
“She nearly died!” the redhead’s friend, a tall blonde with a fat ponytail, said in a mock whisper with great big eyes.
“I wish they’d just make a pill for us to swallow,” the redhead sniffed.
Yvonne handed her a tissue, watching the girl dab her overly made-up eyes. “Then we’d all have to admit we’re doing the deed to get it.”
They all contemplated that thought for a moment, the bathroom going quiet. The spell was broken when two high school girls from Mary Magdalene’s—Leah recognized the uniforms—burst into the bathroom, both of them covered in root beer and giggling madly.
“Good luck,” Yvonne urged, touching the redhead’s arm as they squeezed by the soda-covered teens toward the exit.
The boys were out of the car when they got back and they found them with the high schoolers near the back of the lot, peering up into a tree where some girl’s bra had gotten stuck high up in the branches.
Leah laughed. “How did it get up there?”
“Spring fever for sure.” Erica rolled her eyes. “Come on, Bobby, I told my father I’d be home for dinner. Solie’s making meatloaf. And aren’t you doing a shift at the gas station tonight?”
So they cruised back up Woodward, and it was even colder this time, as the sun was starting to go down. Leah finally begged Bobby to put the top up—her ears were numb—so he did, and she was stuck in the back with the windows getting steamed up by Yvonne and Buddy making out beside her.
She told herself it didn’t matter—she didn’t want to be with Bobby, or Buddy, or any other boy like them really. And it was true, except this time, for the first time, she found herself thinking about the boy—the man—she did want to be with. Leah couldn’t help noticing the way Buddy’s hand slipped under Yvonne’s skirt when they kissed, and how she didn’t stop him. And Leah didn’t blame her. She didn’t blame her at all.
“Call me tonight!” Erica called to Leah as she climbed out of the backseat.
Leah just nodded and waved as Bobby pulled away from the curb. Her mother was home—it was almost six—her Plymouth Belvedere in the driveway. Ada was still here too, and the whole house smelled like liver and onions. She was now very glad she’d finished her root beer float and had eaten the other half of Erica’s hamburger.
“Goodness, your face is red, Missy!” Ada’s soft hand reached to touch Leah’s cheek as she stood in the foyer, toeing off her saddle shoes and hanging up her coat. “And your ears are as cold as a frosted frog!”
“We went cruising. Stopped at A and Dubs.” Leah left her book bag in the foyer, going into the living room where her mother was smoking a cigarette and watching television.
“Well I hope you didn’t spoil your appetite.” Leah’s mother looked up from I Love Lucy.
“Actually, I’m not feeling well,” she lied. “I think I’m going to go lie down.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Missus,” Ada called from the foyer. She was shrugging on her coat. “I’ll be putting in the laundry, so remember to sort your clothes tonight, Leah
.”
“I will,” Leah assured her, hearing the front door open and close as she headed toward the stairs and the sanctuary of her room downstairs in their split-level.
“Leah!” Her mother again, calling her back.
“Yes, Mom?” She poked her head around, hoping for a short conversation, but her mother patted the floral patterned sofa beside her.
“Come here.”
Leah sat, curling her feet under her, arm crooked over the back of the couch, facing her mother. She was a pretty woman still, with the same lithe figure and dark hair as her daughter. Leah had never seen a picture of her father, so she didn’t know if she looked like him. Sometimes she thought she’d sprung completely formed, like an identical twin, from the woman sitting in front of her.
“You got a letter today.” Her mother picked an envelope up off the table, handing it over. Leah noticed it was open. “I didn’t even know you’d applied.”
