If they were close enough the children could hear the small leaps of sound Momma's voice made as she, in a role reversal that would last just these two weeks of summer, enumerated her griefs and their mother nodded silently or cooed in sympathy or said in the mildest, most heartsore protest, “Oh, Momma.”
The distance from Momma's chair to the patch of dirt or parking lot where their mother stood was not two hundred miles and yet it seemed to inspire in the old lady all the regret and loneliness and sense of devastating mortality that whole churning oceans or continents of mountain ranges might elicit.
When their mother had finished off her substantial pile of coins she carefully placed the receiver back in its silver collar and then turned again to her children, usually with tears in her eyes. She touched their heads, their dark hair, and all the green or dusty way back kept at least one of them against her thigh, their shoulders under her arm seeming to satisfy something, so that by the time they returned to the cottage she was no longer carefully preparing them for her imminent departure (“Would you like to come to the train station with me tomorrow?” “Would you like to spend a few days with just Daddy?”) but discussing instead a trip to the drive-in movie tonight or what she might pack for lunch on the beach.
Once when they returned their father had lunch packed already and four fishing rods were leaning against the deep green shingles beside the screen door. For the first time they could remember, he shook his head when their mother said she would stay home to read while he and the children were out on the boat. “No,” he said simply, “we're all going,” and
when she once more declined, politely, almost perfunctorily because all of them knew that she never went out on the boat, he suddenly swung her into his arms and carried her, to the delight of his children, to the front seat of the car. He put his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak to her. “I won't let you drown,” they heard him say.
She went. The boat dock was down a long, narrow road paved with crushed seashells that popped and broke and grew finer under the heavy wheels of the car. It was ramshackle and fishy and half the boats that nosed the pebbly shoreline were filled with water. There was a small wooden hut with a dark mouth, a table where fish were to be cleaned, and a bright red gas pump, circle on top of rectangle, cartoonish in its simplicity. On this day there were six navy-blue seat cushions trimmed with white and decorated with fading white anchors scattered in the sun across the dock, and even the children could tell by the way they lay, dejected somehow, their plumpness a kind of ill health, that they were sodden.
The man who rented the boats here might have seemed a cartoon as well were he not, like the candy-store clerk in Momma's neighborhood, so clearly the authentic version of a caricature. He was thin and wiry with a red face and reddened watery-blue eyes under a white yachtsman's cap stained yellow with sweat. He greeted their father, who seemed to have known him forever, and tipped his hat to their mother and gave off, as he collected their life preservers from the wall behind him and took a packet of squid from the freezer on his right, the flat, sharp, glancingâglancing like the occasional streak of light against his gold toothâodor of alcohol.
As he walked them to their boat he indicated the wet cushions. “Not gone twenty minutes,” the children heard him say, “when they all come paddling back in here. Swamped the boat.”
The single, reaching step from dock to rowboat was a long one, and although their brother nearly embraced the piling beneath the dock, the boat scooted away as their mother stepped into it and she cried out as she stood for a moment with one foot on the dock and the other in the boat, clutching both the captain's hand on one side and her husband's on the other.
With her cautious, unaccustomed presence beside them, the two girls sat primly on the first slat of seat while their brother cast off and their father rowed them out to deeper water, where he lowered the outboard motor and began the complex, delicate process of starting the engine. He pulled the cord, adjusted the choke, pulled again. He stood, the boat rocking beneath him and their mother clutching both sides, and with one final and determined tug (they had seen him use the same stance in starting the lawnmower at home), set the motor running. He sat, well pleased, tugging his dark baseball cap so it dipped over one eye, and, with his hand on the tiller, headed his family out to sea.
The bow of the boat lifted and slammed, bouncing over the wake of the bigger boats, whose captainsâall equals hereâraised their hands in greeting. There was dark water under the slats of the floorboards and the paint across the bow was speckled and peeling. The oar locks shuddered and bumped with each rise and fall, but the two girls beside their motherâwhose fear had turned into something elegant now that she had tied a dark silk scarf over her hairâwatched their father carefully, the vast blue sky behind him and all his attention on what was ahead. Their brother mimicked his pose, his watchfulness, his own baseball cap cocked in just the same way, and when he caught his mother's eye, a strand of hair blown across her cheek, he nodded as his father would have done had he noticed her small smile.
They were back by midafternoon. On the dock, the two girls put their tongues to their arms to taste the salt. They were sunburned and weary and the spray of fish scales that rose from the table where their father and the captain cleaned their catch seemed to them to be, along with the rise and fall of the sea gulls diving for entrails, a sudden celebration of their safe return.
At the cottage, after showers and in fresh clothes, with the potatoes boiling on the stove, their father mixed martinis in a Pyrex measuring cup and poured them into the thick long-stemmed cocktail glasses they had brought from home. Their mother placed slices of American cheese on saltines. The children drank their lemonade and knew that for this part of the hour they would have to entertain themselves as their parents sat silently together on the screened porch, at the front of the house this year. While the boy brought his book to the rocker in the living room, the two girls went into the tiny bedroom they shared. There on the tall dresser with its plastic doily they had placed the two net bags of sugared almonds from last Saturday's wedding. They were lovely colors, bright pink and pale violet and sky blue, gathered in white net and tied with the thinnest white satin bow.
“Let's try them,” the older girl said, and although the younger one had had, until that moment, no intention of ever upsetting the lovely sack they made, had planned, indeed, to place it on her night table at home as a permanent, inedible reminder of the first wedding she'd ever attended, the proposal suddenly made her mouth water.
But she said first, “You open yours.”
After some negotiation on the thin gold counterpane of the lumpy double bed, they agreed each to open her own at the exact same moment and to try just one each. On the count of three, they both began to pull at the small satin ribbon
and might have been thwarted entirely by their lack of fingernails if the older girl hadn't, resourcefully enough, used her teeth.
On another count of three, each put a carefully chosen almond in her mouth (the older girl choosing the prettiest shade, sure it would be the sweetest, the younger the dullest and thus the most easily sacrificed).
They studied one another.
“How does it taste?” the older girl said.
“Like nothing,” the younger one reported. “A little sweet.”
“Bite down,” the older one said, but the younger girl shook her head. “You first.”
“On three,” the older one said and counted a third time.
They cracked the candy shells between their teeth and met the dull, tasteless meat. They held their mouths open, showing each other the half-chewed nut and the slivers of candy coating all white now, the green and pink pastels across their tongues.
They ran together to the bathroom, spitting elaborately into the sink. The older girl held her throat as she drank a cup of water, the younger one scooped water from the faucet into her hands, rinsing what looked like pieces of wood and scraps of eggshell from her mouth.
The almonds and the netting and the satin ribbons now gray with spit lay scattered on the bedspread. They tried to put them together as they had been, but the tiny ribbons were limp and wet and would not hold, and without one almond, the sacks seemed lumpy and misshapen.
“We should have left them the way they were,” the younger girl said. She had inherited her mother's easy access to regret.
Her sister shrugged. “So now we know how bad they taste.”
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That night the family went to a drive-in movie where a platoon of American soldiers had such a difficult time taking a hill that the sound of their heavy artillery seemed to reverberate in the dark, still, starry air as they drove home past potato farms and silent villages.
The girls were wide awake and as they talked in bed they saw a dark slug, its horned devilish head moving slowly to and fro, making its way from out of the cracked baseboard into their room.
They ran to their parents' door first but knew from their father's response (It won't hurt you) and the closed door itself (on such a hot night) that they would get no further sympathy. They went to their brother, who was reading on the couch in the living room where he slept. He agreed to come and then concluded from the path of slime on the linoleum that either it had gone into the closet or under the bed or there were two of them. They begged him to bring out their pillows and sheetsâ“But shake them first!”âstanding on bare tiptoe as they pleaded, enjoying the sense of menace the creature had brought them, the chill in their spines. They spent the next hour pulling chairs from the porch and the kitchen into the living room and suspending themselves across the seats, twisting and turning and spreading their blankets one way and then the next.
So they were all three tangled in the living room and deeply asleep when Mrs. Smiley rapped at the glass sometime before dawn. Their father, tying his robe, stubbed his toe on a kitchen chair and said, “Damn them,” as he went to answer.
The children, barely awake, gave some brief attention to the sound of his voice and Mrs. Smiley's as they spoke on the
porch, although they were aware of their mother standing in the door of the living room, making the sign of the cross over her nightgown in preparation for the worst.
On any number of such mornings in the past, on afternoons when they got back from the beach or the boat or evenings after restaurant dinners, they'd found Mrs. Smiley or Mr. Porter waiting to tell them that there had been a call from Mrs. Dailey's mother. Their own mother greeted the news every time with a quick blessing and a sharp intake of breath and often, just as she clearly feared, the call was indeed about a death, the death of a former neighbor, or a distant relative, of a nun or a priest she had once known whose wake their mother would rush to the train for, although, as their father said, she had not seen or heard from the person in fifteen or twenty years. But more often the call would be about a mere minor accident as when Veronica broke a wrist in a fall or Agnes had her pocketbook snatched on the subway, or about nothing at all. Each year their mother wrote Mrs. Smiley's or Mr. Porter's telephone number on the pad near the phone that was on the table next to Momma's chair and each year the children understood, although no one had ever told them, Momma did the best she could to find some reason to dial it.
They heard their father's voice as he thanked Mrs. Smiley and apologized for the early hour. They heard the screen door slam and might have fallen back to sleep in the time it took for him to see Mrs. Smiley to her car and, standing in the streaked pale light of a summer dawn, watch the car disappear from sight. When he came into the living room again they heard their mother say, “What's wrong?” and were grateful for what struck them as the casual wave of his hand. “Go back to sleep,” he told the children and, making his way across the small room cluttered with their makeshift beds, took their mother's arm.
They listened to their parents' voices for a while longer and then fell asleep again under the first cool breezes of the morning. An hour later, when they woke, their father was sitting at the kitchen table in his Sunday shirt and pants, his work clothes. They were at Momma's place by noon.
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SEPTEMBER BROUGHT a single morning of suddenly cooled air and temporary amnesia that made the children forget, as they washed their faces and combed their hair and slipped into new shoes, new white shirts and gabardine pants or jumpers, that by afternoon the world would be as hot as it was in July and school would no longer seem an adventure.
But on this single morning the blank notebooks were new, as were the book bags and the pencils, and all the streets had been rinsed with rain. The four hundred children who crowded into the basement cafeteria (grades two through five) or the auditorium/gym (grades five through eight) were aware of the smell of paint and new textbooks, and they obeyed the command for silence with a jolly eagerness that even the most experienced teachers failed to recognize as something neither teacher nor student would see again this school year.
Both upstairs and downstairs the microphones whined and were tapped (by the principal downstairs, by the most terrifying eighth-grade teacher above) and blown into before the nun behind each said, “Hello. Can you hear me?” and the children shouted a happy “Yes, Sister!” (The sound of their merry voices pocked here and there with the year's first hint of trouble, a smart-aleck “No, no.”)
“Welcome back,” both teachers said, although upstairs the eighth-grade nun said it with only the smallest of smiles because she had read the lips of two of the naysayers, one a redhead and easy enough to remember, the other destined for her own class, and downstairs the principal said it without meeting the children's eyes because in a summer-long state of weariness with the world she had defied a school tradition and avoided two weeks of messing with class rosters by declaring that this year each grade would move on to the next in the same class group it had formed the year before. Not the best thing for the children, some of her subordinates had whispered, using the vocabulary of gangsters (you've got to shake them up, they said, break them up, get them to see things differently), but, Dear God, Sister thought as she read her instructions into the wavering microphone, what harm?
“Third-graders in Mrs. Shaw's class last year will be in Sister Miriam Joseph's fourth-grade class this year.”
At the head of the long center aisle that divided the rows of lunch tables, Sister Miriam Joseph held out both arms and snapped her fingers like a Greek dancer. “Come up here, little ones. Come, come, come.” She was tall and dark and slim and beautiful. She swung around to take the class list from the principal's hand and then swung back again, her beads clicking, to say, “Come along, come along,” to the children, who had risen unsteadily from their seats and were now staggering toward her, their large empty book bags and new lunch boxes catching on every hip and chair leg.
Maryanne, the younger girl, reached her first, or was drawn reluctantly into first place by the nun's thin hand on her head. “Every little one line up behind this little one,” she said. She was twenty-six years old and had entered the convent at nineteen. Under her white scapular, which swung close enough to brush Maryanne's forehead, her waist was defined by a man's
black belt, fastened at the last notch, and her stomach was flat and taut between the bones of her hips. She seemed to move constantly, even as she stood to read out the name of each child, her free hand still placed on Maryanne's head (so that when the child said, “Here,” her voice was muffled by the woman's robes) and her scent of starched wool and soap and sharp cinnamon rising in short puffs from the various breezes the movement of her garments sent across the child's cheek.
When the last name had been read, Sister Miriam Joseph lowered the paper and raised her hand and with another snap of her fingers said, “Come along.” She turned. The pale tile floor was newly waxed but it might have been ice the way she spun and glided, her black shoes flashing as she led them across the front of the cafeteria, past the shining silver lunch counter behind which the three fat lunch ladies nodded and smiled in their own September amnesia, loving their jobs, and then out into the hallway.
She swung around constantly to look over her shoulder and to say again, “Come along,” and Maryanne, who had spent last year under the care of Mrs. Shaw, a chubby, middle-aged woman with pearls and perfume and six children of her own, realized for the first time how much she had missed the daily proximity of a nun, gazing up at her tall black veil and down to the flash of her black stockings and heels with all the grateful nostalgia of a penitent returned to the flock.
She loved her. She loved her even before they reached the classroom door and, stepping back, Sister Miriam allowed Maryanne to be the first to see the long, black chalkboard filled to every corner with butterflies and flowers and Snoopys and Charlie Browns, drawn in such a variety of colored chalksâthe first colored chalk Maryanne had ever seen used in this schoolâthat each letter of
Welcome, Sister Miriam Joseph, O.P.,
and
Class 4-A
had been written in a different
shade. She loved her before she had a chance to study her lovely face, her dark eyes and her long lashes and the cheekbones that her white wimple made ever more pronounced. It was dazzling when Sister Miriam smiled but Maryanne loved her even before she'd seen the white teeth and the flashing eyes and the dimples, before she realized that her accent was a city accent and that, as Sister erased part of the board for the first lesson, she was cracking a small piece of gum between her back teeth. Loved her even before, at the end of this first day, Sister Miriam closed the classroom door and distributed to her class of thirty-eight one piece each of Dentyne gum which she allowed them to chew for three minutes by the clock and then collected on two pieces of lined paper, saying now that she had let them chew their gum in class they couldn't hold it against her when she chewed hers, printing out the word HYPOCRISY on the one cleared board.
Maryanne loved her immediately, as did six or seven of the other little girls in the class, but unlike them her love did not imply emulation. While the other little girls told themselves
I will be a nun, I will be a nun,
as Sister leaned over them at their desks, brushing their arms with her robes, placing her long, thin hand with its single gold band on their desks, Maryanne whispered instead, “I have the saddest thing in the world to tell you.”
Her intention was not to emulate but to charm, to be admitted into the young woman's life as no other student or friend or other nun had ever been, to become for Sister Miriam Joseph the very wonder that the nun was for her.
Sister took the thin fountain pen from the girl's handâthe first lesson of the year had been, had always been, in penmanshipâcapped it and placed it in the small well on the desk. She took her hand, eyes and only slightly raised heads following them, and led her to the corner between the window and
the desk. She crouched down before the child. Maryanne could see the way the starched white crown of her habit bit into her forehead, pressing against her brows, and later would see when Sister pushed it back with her thumbs how the edge of it had turned her dark skin red. “What is it, little one?” she whispered. There was gold in her dark irises.
Maryanne told the story as only a child would: “My aunt got married this summer and four days later she died,” but it was story enough to make Sister Miriam Joseph put a hand to her heart. “Ah,” she said as if she had indeed felt some pain. “I'm so sorry.” Her own sister, more beautiful than she, had been married that summer as well and so it was natural that she imagined a slim young bride in a white dress and lace mantilla, white lace covering the backs of her hands.
“Was it an accident?” the nun asked and Maryanne shook her head. She could only repeat what she had been told. “Something burst inside her.”
Sister Miriam touched the child's arm and looked to her right, to the black perforations of the radiator cover that ran the length of the wall under the window, and then across the black sill to the hedge and the lawn and the white statue of Christ with his robed arms extended toward the traffic and his back to the school.
Some months from now, she will tell her class why she entered the convent. On their desks in front of them they will have their catechisms opened to the chapter on Holy Orders, to a two-panel illustration, one of a woman serving her family their dinnerâ“This is good” printed beneathâand the other of a nun receiving Communion from a priest: “This is better.” She disliked the illustration and in order to offset it told her class every year that as a little girl she had liked parties and playing with dolls and pretending to be a bride. In high school she'd gone to eleven different proms and on the night before
she left for the convent she kissed her current boyfriend goodbye and told him, “That's it for me. It's been fun.” She loved her familyâthree brothers and two sisters, Italian and Irish, everybody closeâand became a nun not because she thought this was good but this is better (her long finger on the open page) but because despite her own happiness and good fortune she was aware of the fact that the world was littered with pain, unbearable pain, pain that took so many forms it seemed impossible to stop. Cure polio, she said, her class of astonished fourth-graders gazing up openmouthed as her voice grew louder, and you've got cancer. Cure cancer and a plane crashes. Feed the hungryâshe might have gone on were it not for their small, astonished facesâand an earthquake topples their city. Spend an hour every day, your high-school lunch hour, for instance, visiting the sick, comforting the elderly, and then stumble upon the homeliest boy in your school weeping bitterly against his locker.
I became a nun, she told her class every year until her last, when she could discover in her own explanation no reason to stay one, because a nun's life is a prayer, and given the breadth of our sorrow, the relentlessness of our difficulties, prayer seemed the only solution.
Now, watching the traffic and the broad white shoulders of the stone-robed Christ, she began to form her prayer for the girl's family, for the young husband and the parents and the sister and the brothers, for the soul of the bride herself. “What a sad time to die,” she said and then added because she suddenly saw the cruelty in it (and understood that if she were to keep her faith in God she could not call that cruelty fate), “I'm sure she went right to heaven.”
She looked at the child. “Tell your family that for me, won't you? Tell them that God would have taken her right to heaven. I'm sure of it.”
The girl nodded and whispered, “Yes, Sister,” although for her by then the story of her aunt's death was no longer true. That it had actually happened was beside the point; it was no longer true as a real event because it had become for her instead a means by which to win the sister's attention, to secure her love, and once the child recognized this (it happened in that moment when Sister Miriam had leaned down over her desk and taken her hand and said, “Open up those
e
's”), once she recognized that the story of her aunt's deathânot the fact but the storyâcould do this for her, it became something she could wield, something she could own and offer in a way that no real event would allow. It became pure story.
“Well, she was a nun once, too,” the child added, smiling, feeling as grateful for the detail as if it had come to her through divine inspiration alone, as if she had, brilliantly, made it up in order to catch again and carefully secure Sister Miriam's complete attention. The nun's face showed some surprise, some trace of the effort it took her to reimagine the dead bride and the bereft husband (both older, surely, he balding), to replace her sister's face in its white veil with her own.
“Was she?” she said.
Behind them the class was growing restless. The sound of small whispering voices moved toward them like a dangerous animal approaching through dry grass. In another minute Sister Miriam would have to look up over the girl's head and say with her mouth hanging open in the street-tough, arrogant way she had learned as a teenager in Bensonhurst, “Uhh, excuse me? Excuse me, please. Don't you people have work to do?”
But for now Sister only watched the child as she spoke in a thrilled and breathless way that in other circumstance would have marked her a liar. “It was a long, long time ago. She got
sick or something, so she couldn't be a nun anymore. She had to leave.”
For now, Sister Miriam Joseph, in reimagining the tragedy, found herself turning over and over again each of the confounded hopes, the dashed expectations of this unknown woman's life: the joy of submission when her vocation struck her as inevitable and clear, the realization of her worst fear when something as mundane, as preordained, as illness forced her to leave religious life; the redemption, some years later, that secular love would have offered: not God and all mankind to serve (this is better) but a husband and perhaps a child or two (this is good)âwhat is good, only good, at her age perhaps having become far preferable to what was both impossible and better. And then that snatched from her too, four days after she'd been a bride, slept with the man she loved for the first time, begun her life again.
Sister looked up over the child's neat brown hair, the pale line of her scalp, and as she'd done as a teenager on city street corners raised her eyebrows and dropped her mouth open and said, “Ahh, excuse me? Excuse me?” She had never mustered the proper arrogance then, never perfected that scorn the less beautiful girls had adopted so easily, girls who would not bring the homeliest boy in the school to their prom because they had found him crying against his locker, or spend their lunch period smiling for a group of dying women in a dismal nursing home. She had gotten the tone right, back then, the raised voice and the opened mouth and the pained surprise in the eyes, but she hadn't gotten the scorn until now as she squatted before the child in her white robes and her black veil on this morning of the first day of the new school year and now she turned both perfect arrogance and perfect scorn upon the small white faces of her fourth-grade class. Working the gum that kept her mouth from becoming so unbearably
dry (the first symptom of her own illness), she said, “Excuse me please. Don't you people have work to do?” with such arrogance and scorn that the children sensed for one second what it was that all their work would ever come to and sensing this they slumped in their chairs and lowered their eyes to the page of jumbled, smudged, imperfect words before them.