Agatha of Little Neon Page 11

  “Agatha, you wouldn’t believe it,” Mary Lucille said. “High ceilings, broad windows, shiny wood floors.”

  “It was lovely. But the weird thing was, it was so empty. Everything in the house was missing its match,” Therese said. “There was a big dining table, but just one chair, and there was a piano bench but no piano.”

  “And the walls were empty, but you could see blank spots where frames used to hang,” Frances added. “The hooks were still in the walls.”

  Mrs. Scrimshaw asked them to please remove their shoes. The whole place smelled of acetone. “She offered us filtered water from the fridge,” Mary Lucille said. “Or SlimFast or old chardonnay.” The three of them filled their glasses with water and drank and filled them again. While they chugged, Mrs. Scrimshaw said, “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” and gestured to a grapefruit spoon and half a hollowed-out rind on the counter. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.” She blew on her fingernails and asked if, since they were here, one of them wouldn’t mind opening the box. Her hands, she said, would be useless for at least an hour.

  Therese said she would. They tried to act as if they didn’t know what to expect, but of course they’d already had a look at the juicer. Therese poured out all the Styrofoam peanuts. When she placed the apparatus on the counter, Mrs. Scrimshaw came close and bowed before it in reverence. “Just gorgeous. It’s everything I hoped for,” she gushed. “Do you all drink much juice?” My sisters said they didn’t, no.

  Juice had many health benefits, Mrs. Scrimshaw told them, but when they asked what they were, she said she couldn’t remember the specifics, but she knew she’d seen it in a headline. “She told us she was also trying to waste less produce,” Frances said.

  Mrs. Scrimshaw worked most days at the Pawtucket shop where girls went to get sterling studs punched in their ears for $19.95. The job left her with no energy to cook, and besides that, she had lately found mealtimes unpleasant. It was hard to cook for just one person, she said. And each piece of cutlery and china in her cupboard—wedding gifts, all—reminded her that the man she loved was at some other table, eating off some other plate.

  “We gave each other a look like, wow, this woman’s a perfect candidate for Bible study,” Therese said.

  “Forsaken women need direction, a safe haven,” Frances said. “The abandoned, the sad, and the aimless—these people want someone to tell them how to put their lives back together. So I’m standing there, thinking, huh, okay, I guess God meant for us to find that juicer! So I took a flyer from my handbag and I was ready to give my spiel.”

  “But before we could say anything, she asked us if we had our ears pierced. She wasn’t sure if nuns could wear jewelry.” Mary Lucille said. “And I told her I used to wear earrings before I took my vows, but probably the holes had closed up. And she took my earlobe in her fingers—just reached out and pinched it!—and said, ‘I could repierce them for you. Just wiggle an earring in, force it out the other side.’ And I said uh, no thanks.”

  “She must be clinically depressed,” Frances said. “Divorce is such a major life change. She’s probably lonely, and that’s why she wanted to talk to us so much.”

  “But she spends all day talking to people, touching their ears,” Therese said.

  “That’s hardly enough,” Frances said, “for a heartbroken lady.”

  “Anyway, Agatha,” Therese went on, “she kept talking and talking. She told us about all the little girls who’d come in recently.”

  “I was waiting for a chance to bring up Bible study, but she talked for so long,” Frances said. “She told us how to use the piercing gun, and the difference between cubic zirconia and diamond, and the name of the puppet she uses to distract the difficult girls.”

  “What did she mean by ‘difficult,’” I asked, but I already knew. I could see them in my mind, these girls, who were not happy, or excited, or in a good mood. Girls who did not open their eyes the entire time. Or the ones who came in with no parent, and no permission slip, and had to be turned away. I could picture other girls, too: girls who were silent and afraid, stiff with worry, cheeks drained, on the verge of passing out; or the ones who weren’t girls but infants, fragile and asleep, or else stiff-necked and howling. I imagined that many girls couldn’t, wouldn’t be calmed; they arched their backs and screamed so loud they were made to leave. Some would need a hard sell. Some, incentives and bribes—milkshakes, teddy bears, time with their fathers’ phones. I was sure many girls said no, no, no, no, no.

  “I bet they’re just dramatic,” Frances said. “It only hurts a second.”

  “Or they’re rude,” Mary Lucille said, “and forget to say thank you.”

  What if they weren’t thankful, I thought. “Then what,” I asked.

  “She made celery juice. It tasted like refrigerator. And then at some point we invited Mrs. Scrimshaw to Bible study,” Therese said. “She said she had to check her calendar, but she definitely seemed interested.”

  “I hope she comes,” Frances said. “She seemed so … unmoored.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s a shame.” I waited to see if there was anything else they wanted to tell me. I was eager to finish my grading.

  “But she’s lovely, too,” Frances said. She crossed her arms. “She was really nice to us.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure.”

  “It must be a nice job,” Mary Lucille said, looking off into the distance, “to all day make girls happy.”

  42.

  Two photographers—a woman with slumped shoulders who kept sneezing, and a bald man in a leather jacket who called each girl “babe”—came to take the school yearbook pictures. In third period, Nadia and I waited for our turns in the fifth-floor chapel. I watched her work a plastic comb through a knot in her hair. She’d spilled coffee on her ivory sweater, but she didn’t seem to notice, or care. We were in the back of the line, and ahead of us were all our third-period students, who were peering into pocket mirrors and moving each other’s hair around in preparation.

  “What does one give one’s mother?” Nadia said. “I have to find a gift for my mom. Her birthday is”—she looked at her watch—“well, tomorrow.”

  It was thrilling how relaxed she was with me, as if she didn’t know I was a woman religious, or didn’t care. “Flowers?” I said. “I don’t know. What does your mom like to do?”

  “Drink,” Nadia said, and shrugged. “Whistle. Watch those shows where women take other women to the mall and tell them what pants to buy. She lives in South Boston. When I was a kid she sold perfume door-to-door. It was a pyramid scheme, I’m pretty sure. Then she married Ralph, who does something with oil. He calls me ‘kid.’ They go on cruises.” She gave up on the knot and stuck the comb in her pocket. “Flowers are a good idea. Last year I bought her a tin of cheese popcorn.”

  Two more students went to sit and grin in front of the blue backgrounds, and Nadia and I stepped forward. She asked me about my mother—where did my mother live?

  “Oh, she died a long time ago,” I said.

  Nadia’s face fell.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s been years.” But then she reached for me, and we were hugging. Everything Nadia did was a little astonishing: it was so easy for her to do the things that scared me.

  I tried to think of something to say to undo the quiet, but nothing presented itself.

  “How do I look?” Nadia asked me, when it was time for us to have our pictures taken.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  43.

  Frances wanted to go on the radio to advertise the Bible study.

  She called the easy-listening station in Woonsocket and the top-forty station in Providence, and both quoted her hundreds of dollars for a sixty-second ad, but the Christian contemporary station in Warwick would let her record an ad for free. Their listener count was a fraction of the other stations’, but Frances couldn’t say no to a deal.

  Mary Lucille and Therese helped her plan. After some disagreement over the s
cript—Frances wanted to go in an “absolutely bonkers” direction, and was being a bit of a “diva,” Mary Lucille told me, when we were alone—they came up with something everyone was happy with. And then they spent the better part of a Monday in a Warwick recording studio.

  When the ad was about to air, a couple of nights later, I was at the kitchen table, reading about what made polygons congruent. Eileen was across from me, solving practice reading comprehension questions for the GED, and my sisters were outside sitting in the white van, parked on the driveway with the engine on so they could listen to the radio. Mary Lucille came inside to get us. “Agatha! You guys! Hurry! It’s almost time.”

  “Can I just wait for the next one?” I asked. The ad was scheduled to air eighteen times a week for four weeks: it would play seventy-one more times. “I have a lot of reading to do.”

  “But we’re all together now! Come on, this is important,” Mary Lucille said, and took me by the wrist. “Eileen, you too!”

  In the van Therese and Frances were jittery with excitement. Eileen and I piled into the back, and Mary Lucille stepped in and shut the door.

  “Can you hear back there?” Frances asked. She turned the volume up, and the last chords of a song played. Then there was the blast of a whistle, and a man began to shout. “Unclaimed fur sale!” The words were all crammed together. “November seventh and eighth at 683 Park Avenue in Cranston! Fox jackets, one eighty-eight! Raccoon vests, one twenty-eight! Mink coats, three forty-eight! Used furs! Discounted brand-new furs! Outlet furs! Furs from storage vaults and non-payment layaways! Two days only in Cranston!”

  “Was that you, Frances?” I said. Only Eileen laughed.

  Their commercial was next. Frances’s voice came through the speaker: “What’s so cool about the Bible?” and then they spent the rest of the minute supplying answers: it’s hip to learn more about God; it’s cool to gain wisdom; it’s fun to meet like-minded people. “But wait, there’s more!” Therese said, near the end. “Come to the next meeting of the Little Neon Bible Study, and you’ll get one free jar of Divine Dijon mustard.”

  It was over so quickly. Eileen said, “Wow, you’re famous!”

  I said, “Hey, that was really great.” I needed to get back to my textbook.

  “Do I really sound like that?” Frances said. “So nasally?”

  “You sounded good!” Mary Lucille said. “Do you think people were listening?”

  “Oh yeah,” Frances said. “It’s eight-twenty p.m. Prime time!”

  “I’m glad we threw in the mustard,” Therese said. “It makes it more exciting.”

  “Yeah, that was such a good idea on your part,” Frances said. “Who doesn’t love free mustard?”

  44.

  In class I talked about the triangle. Everything good comes in threes, I said: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost; frankincense, gold, myrrh. In the case of triangles: angles, lines, and vertices. The girls drew triangles on the board and named them: BLT; breakfast, lunch, dinner; Beyoncé, Kelly, Michelle.

  I took it all too seriously, maybe. I spoke of congruent shapes in reverent tones; how special, how beautiful, that two shapes might coincide completely when superimposed.

  The students took turns tracing the outlines of each other’s bodies, and then shrank them to scale. This activity was meant to demonstrate the ratio of the girl’s shape to her miniature.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. What kind of dolt forced a bunch of girls to stare long and hard at their own bodies, then imagine what it’d be like if they took up less space?

  45.

  In response to our letters to the pope, the Vatican’s Office of Correspondence sent four identical envelopes with four identical slips of paper inside, thanking us for contacting His Holiness. We read them aloud in unison. “We regret that the Office cannot respond personally to every correspondence,” the letters said. “However, please rest assured that the Holy Father thanks you for writing and will remember you in His prayers.” We found, enclosed with the letters, eight-by-ten glossy photographs of the pope, smiling and waving at the camera, with his signature laser-printed in the corner. He had a tiny round head, a shock of white hair, ears that stuck out, a brow that was always furrowed.

  “What a treasure,” Frances said, and beamed at the photo. She smoothed out the creases with a fingernail.

  “I’ve never received mail from the pope before,” Therese said.

  “I can’t believe how quickly he replied,” Mary Lucille said.

  He didn’t, I wanted to say. His secretary did. Any half-decent person who wanted one could have received that same form letter in the mail. I was hardly moved, but they looked so happy, so proud. My sisters—workhorses of the church! quiet keepers of the word of God!—were pleased just to be on the same planet as the pope. Their elation bothered me, though I couldn’t pinpoint why.

  The three of them Scotch-taped the pictures next to their beds in the attic. I folded mine up and tucked it into my school bag.

  “Oh, you creased it,” Mary Lucille said, pained. “Why did you do that?”

  I told her I was going to bring it to school. I didn’t tell her I would slip it in a drawer where I couldn’t see it.

  46.

  There were a number of students who worried me, who fell asleep in class or stared out the window the whole hour, but none was as perplexing as Samantha. She was as strange as she was smart. When made to answer a question in class, she spoke in a low murmur but wouldn’t make eye contact—her eyes strayed out the window, or to the ceiling. She spent most class periods drawing on her knuckles, the skin of her knees, and the soles of her sneakers, with a Magic Marker. She did well on tests, and her assignments were written in penmanship that looked painful in its perfection.

  * * *

  One week in early October, the biology teachers made students dissect fetal pigs. Nadia showed me one after lunch: pink and stiff and sunk in formaldehyde, zipped inside a plastic bag. They’d been injected with a series of colored dyes so the students could tell the organs apart. The dissections were supposed to take place over the course of five days. I asked what they did with them after five days, and Nadia said, “Throw them in the dumpster.”

  Samantha was opposed to the dissection and circulated a petition to abolish the use of animal cadavers in favor of an interactive computer program that allowed students to dissect virtual frogs, but she collected only six signatures. The day students were supposed to make their first cuts into the fetal pigs, Samantha came to school in a pink, fuzzy, full-body pig costume, complete with ears and a snout. Mr. Ruby gave her detention and asked her to change into her gym uniform. She refused, and he called her mother to come pick her up. Each day that week, her mother called the school and said Samantha was staying home sick.

  Nadia gave her full credit on the pig project.

  * * *

  I tried to make class time fun. Early on, when we learned how to calculate the areas of shapes and polygons, I brought candy ribbons and squares of chocolate and asked them to calculate: length times width. Later, they made three-dimensional shapes from toothpicks and gumdrops. In another class, they computed that the basement gym could fit 3,272 gallons of water in a hypothetical flash flood.

  I worked to make them happy, but I knew nothing about the girls’ lives or what they wanted. I noticed the way they talked with other teachers in the hallways; they laughed with Mr. Claude in a way they never laughed with me. In my class, they sat stiff and wordless, and when the bell rang they went to each other with obvious relief. Except Samantha. Samantha never went to anyone with relief.

  During a passing period, the European history teacher, a fat man with no eyebrows, was hurrying up the stairs, head low in his focus, damp under the arms, breathing hard with effort. The stairs were crowded, filled with girls in their backpacks, and he had to charge and weave his way. At the same moment, a biology teacher, bearing a box full of fetal pigs in their sacks of preservative, was walking cautiously downstairs in or
der to find space for the pigs in the first-floor supply closet. So oblivious was the history teacher that he did not see the biology teacher or the box of pigs until he had collided with her, and she crashed down and the pigs went splort down the steps. Their plastic sacs broke on impact, and formaldehyde rushed out, and little unborn pigs lay like hunks of rubber at the bottom of the steps.

  Eleven pigs were lost that day. The mess it made! Girls got splashed with chemicals and had to change into gym uniforms. Formaldehyde is a horrible thing: toxic, carcinogenic, putrid. Like lacquered flesh. The smell sank into everything: the floorboards, the girls’ shoes, their eyelashes, their throats.

  The faculty was called for another after-school meeting. We sat close to each other in the back of the room. The principal clicked through another slideshow, this time about hallways and the use of the stairs. There were three steps to safety: LOOK, LISTEN, STAY ALIVE.

  The principal said there would be a new rule: the stairways would now be unidirectional. People walking upward—from a lower floor to a higher floor—would need to walk in the north stairwell; all downward walking would happen in the south stairwell.

  Nadia turned to me. “That was my idea,” she whispered.

  She raised a hand. “That was my idea,” she said, louder this time. “And you said it wasn’t in God’s plan.”

  The principal shrugged. “God’s plan can change.”

  Nadia sighed and slumped back in her chair, and the principal continued. “I’ll announce the new rule in the morning. I ask you to enforce it strictly and without forgiveness. Students found in defiance of the rule will be issued demerits.” He then looked directly at me. “And one final reminder. Giving students candy, even for the purposes of instructional activities and as prizes for achievement, is against school policy. It encourages unsafe behaviors like eating in the hallways, and endangers those students and faculty members who have allergies”—here he pointed to Mr. Claude, who raised a hand, sheepish—“and so I ask you, my colleagues, to remember this policy.”