Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  I nodded, biting my tongue, all the while making mental notes of his terminology (“endangers”!) and taking mental snapshots of the lionhearted Mr. Claude, so that later, with Nadia, I could laugh about the entire thing.

  The next day I watched the students’ faces as the principal announced the new rule over the intercom. “The stairwells will henceforth be unidirectional. You shall not walk up the south stairwell, and you shall not walk down the north stairwell.”

  The girls narrowed their eyes and turned to each other in confusion. They’d have to change their routines, the ways they went from class to class.

  For many weeks the principal enjoyed a rise in popularity among the faculty. So much more efficient was the hall traffic that girls were no longer late to class, and teachers needed not penalize them for tardiness.

  The girls got wise to the ways they could fill the new spare moments before the bell rang. In the bathrooms, they darkened their lash lines with the ink of ballpoint pens. They leaned against their lockers and snuck Doritos. They tossed pennies out the third-floor window and leaned forward to watch them drop. They told fortunes from folded scrap paper. I watched them meet each other in doorways, on benches, outside the computer lab, where they disclosed to each other everything they knew about the universe.

  I watched them with something like envy. They always had things to tell each other.

  47.

  You would not believe how many people are interested in a free jar of mustard.

  The week after the ad aired, there was a crowd at Bible study. Even the twin girls, the ones who usually ran off after their mother drove away—even they stuck around when they heard there was a free gift.

  My sisters were thrilled with the turnout, even if some attendees were only there for the condiments. It was standing room only. There were a few teenagers and a few grown men and a bunch of grown women, maybe twenty people altogether. Everyone deposited a mountain of parkas on the kitchen table and came to sit on the corduroy couch and the living room floor and the wonky footstool. Next week, Frances told Therese and Mary Lucille, they’d have to borrow folding chairs from the parish.

  “Great week to meet someone, Tim Gary,” I heard Mary Lucille whisper. “So many new people!” Then, louder: “You too, Pete, Eileen. Baby. Love is in the air! I can feel it!” Pete and Eileen smiled, and Baby blushed.

  “Should we wait a few minutes?” Mary Lucille asked when it was time to start. “To see if Mrs. Scrimshaw comes?”

  Frances checked her watch. “Maybe she had to work.”

  “Maybe she’s sick,” Therese said.

  They watched the door for a minute or two, and then they looked at each other and shrugged.

  It was lucky that the week so many people showed up was the week we were discussing the Gospel of Luke. It’s my favorite of the four. Luke’s Jesus is the kindest Jesus, the one who’s always forgiving people. And in Luke there are more women than in any other gospel. The women are healed. They’re good examples. They notice things. When women see that Jesus has risen, and men don’t believe the women, Jesus says to the men, “How foolish you are!” It delights me.

  * * *

  We discussed the Parable of the Persistent Widow, a story within a story, in which Jesus tells His disciples about a poor widow who went to a judge and pled, “Grant me justice against my adversary.”

  “Who’s her adversary?” a woman with bangs asked, from the back.

  “Like, an enemy,” Pete said. “Right?”

  Frances nodded. Then everyone spoke at once:

  “Maybe it’s her evil twin.”

  “I bet it’s whoever killed her husband.”

  “Probably her evil twin killed her husband.”

  “It doesn’t say her husband was murdered, just that he died.”

  “Maybe she killed him herself.”

  Frances switched the lights on and off. “Quiet. Quiet. Her adversary just represents whatever is harmful to her,” she said. “It could be another person, sure, but it could also be, more generally, temptation, or lust, or wrath, or sloth. We don’t know. We have no way of knowing. Let’s move on.” She continued reading: the judge refused to help the widow. But the widow kept asking and asking until she wore him down, and finally he agreed.

  “What’s God trying to tell us here?” Therese asked.

  A lanky boy in a too-big sports jersey raised a hand. “I think it’s about not being annoying,” he said. “You have to respect people’s wishes.”

  “I think it’s the opposite,” Tim Gary said. “I think God’s telling us not to lose heart.”

  A girl with a lot of eye makeup put her hand up. “Right. The woman keeps trying. And then finally she gets what she wants.”

  “So if you ask God to avenge your ex-husband enough times,” an older woman said, “He will?”

  * * *

  When the hour was up, Frances distributed the mustard. Abbess Paracleta had brought us a box of Divine Dijon in tiny glass jars. On the label there was an illustration of a woman in a habit, eating a hot dog with a bright stripe of mustard. “See you next week,” Frances said, smiling, and placed one in every open palm.

  48.

  Tim Gary’s birthday was on Halloween. On birthdays, Abbess Paracleta liked to take the Neons to the diner for dinner. They could have unlimited soda and order whatever dish they wanted, so long as it cost less than $15.99. We could come, too, she said; she’d just have to change the rule to $12.99.

  I gave my sisters haircuts that day, the crops I knew from muscle memory: straight across on Frances and Therese, and shaggy for Mary Lucille. I cut a chunk from my ponytail, too. As we walked to the diner I kept finding new little hairs to brush from their shoulders and my own.

  We walked as a group: Mary Lucille, Frances, Eileen, Pete, Baby, Tim Gary, and me. The place smelled of broiler char and ranch dressing. The sound was a maddening din: high-pitched voices, dishes clattering, and some song from the radio blaring overhead. At every table there was a kid in some getup. Babies as vegetables, children as adults—a doctor, a firefighter, a member of the armed forces—or nonhuman entities—a lion, a Frankenstein, a red M&M.

  Abbess Paracleta was helping the hostess push four tables together. I sat next to Tim Gary in the middle.

  The waiter was a doe-eyed young man. He told us he loved our costumes and would be right back with some waters.

  “Oh, these aren’t—” Mary Lucille started.

  “Water. Yes. Great,” Abbess Paracleta cut in, and pointed to the tent menu on our table—there was a discount for customers in costume.

  We busied ourselves looking at the menu, cased in plastic, complete with high-color pictures of battered and fried foods, ribs lacquered in sauce.

  The table wobbled each time the waiter set down a water. Tim Gary announced he would like a Coke. There wasn’t much on the menu he could eat; burgers and pasta were too tough to chew, but he settled on tomato soup. “Tomato soup, and a big Coke.”

  I ordered tomato soup, too.

  The abbess motioned for the waiter to bend down, and then she whispered conspiratorially in his ear.

  Pete couldn’t decide which TV screen he wanted to watch the football game on. His eyes kept darting from one to another. I watched him react to what he saw: his face went so quickly from hope to doom and back to hope.

  Tim Gary sucked his Coke. He looked as if he might cry. And after the bowl of soup was placed in front of him, after he’d spooned it all into his mouth, after everyone’s plates were cleared, Tim Gary did cry, a heavy rush of tears.

  “What’s wrong?” Mary Lucille said.

  “Were you rooting for the Seahawks?” Pete said.

  “Didn’t you like your soup?” Therese said.

  “Was it too spicy?” Eileen said.

  Tim Gary wiped fast at his face, brought a napkin to his nose. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said. “I just feel—it’s not that I’m not grateful—it’s just—”

  Right then
the waiter appeared and presented a bowl of pudding with a lit candle stuck in. It felt wrong to start singing, but it seemed wronger not to sing at all, so we sang at a sped-up tempo. When it was over, he wiped his cheeks and pinched out the candle.

  Abbess Paracleta said, “God’s given you a lot of chances in life, Tim Gary. You should be grateful.”

  Then Tim Gary said, “I know. I’m not—”

  We waited.

  “It’s not that I don’t like living with all of you,” he said, and our cups of water shook when he set his elbows on the table. “It’s just that—I am so tired of going through life alone. You don’t know what it’s like, never to have someone.”

  Abbess Paracleta told him he wasn’t seeing things right. She listed his blessings: Little Neon, his health, his job, us. She quoted a psalm about giving thanks to the Lord, for He is merciful.

  “And besides! I bet you’ll meet someone when you least expect it!” Mary Lucille said. “Love will just sneak up on you! Catch you unawares!”

  “Yeah!” Frances said. “I knew a woman who got a flat tire one day, and she called AAA, and the guy who came to fix it is now her husband! They have three kids, and a dog named Hercules! You just never know!”

  Tim Gary shook his head. “You don’t get it. I’m a freak,” he said. “You see my face? Kids call me names.” He spooned pudding into his mouth.

  “Oh, the Bible is full of freaks,” Therese said. She listed them on her fingers. “At some point there’s a talking donkey. And Joseph’s got that crazy coat. And who’s weirder than Jesus? The guy could walk on water.”

  Tim Gary said, “Uh-huh.”

  Abbess Paracleta said, “You’ve been blessed with another year of life, because of God’s mercy. It’s reason to rejoice.” And in that way the conversation ended. She lifted a napkin to wipe the chocolate from his mouth, then stood to pay the bill.

  We were in that diner just fifty minutes. Abbess Paracleta drove off in her truck, and the nine of us walked home without saying much. How much less alone I felt, hearing Tim Gary say those things—I’d never talked to my sisters like that, never admitted to feelings of gloom. I watched him walk, head low. Pete was beside him, making conversation, but Tim Gary never once looked up.

  49.

  The next Friday night, to help us get in touch with the artist within, Mary Lucille presented a huge block of gray clay, wrapped in plastic. She’d bartered for it with a woman who owned a pottery studio in Cranston. I asked her what she’d given the woman in exchange for the twenty pounds of clay, and Mary Lucille said, “Three jars of mustard and a string of cheap plastic rosary beads.”

  Mary Lucille reduced the gray block into eight manageable hunks and gave one to each of us. She told us we could make whatever we wanted, as long as it was not in any way profane or intended to be used as drug paraphernalia.

  “She’s talking to you, Therese,” Baby said. Eileen and I laughed, but no one else did.

  I didn’t know what to make. Baby was making something complicated: a teapot, we saw, after a while, with a gooseneck spout and a tiny removable lid. Eileen was sculpting a dish in which to put her retainer. Tim Gary was making a candlestick. Pete, beads to string on a necklace for his daughter. Therese and Frances were fashioning pinch pots to hold who knows what. I decided to copy what Mary Lucille was doing: she was shaping tiny figurines of religious people.

  The work was wet and quiet and cold. The whole process would take a few weeks, Mary Lucille explained: we had to let them dry, then bake them in the high school’s kiln, then paint them, then bake them again.

  She showed me how to smooth a lump of clay into a little figure, and she used the sharp end of a thumbtack to indicate eyes, a kabob skewer to shape the limbs. There was no patron saint of jaw cancer, so I tried to fashion Saint Apollonia, patron saint of toothache, to give to Tim Gary. But she looked more like a cocktail weenie.

  50.

  Baby wanted his resumé to stand out. “Maybe I should use colored paper,” he said. “Orange, or blue.” He was tired of working at the ice factory: “Too damn cold.” He wanted to wait tables or sell discount shoes or develop film. He wanted to put on a clean shirt and a belt and go apply for jobs.

  He had a hard time keeping his letters straight, so he dictated, and selected a font he liked, and I typed up his employment history.

  “Okay. Ice factory. I stack bags of ice on pallets and count them. I, uh—I monitor product quality. When there’s foreign objects in the ice, or the ice is yellow, or the bags aren’t tied right, I fix it. My manager said I could put his name down as a reference.” He told me the man’s name and phone number. “And before this, in prison, I worked in the laundry room,” he said, “and also the kitchen.”

  I didn’t know how to phrase this in a way that an employer wouldn’t notice or, if they did notice, would find benign.

  He picked up on my hesitation. “Before I dropped out of school, I made snow cones at the mall. They made me wear a stupid hat. And I sold popcorn for the Boy Scouts, but that was only one season, because the Boy Scouts are gay.”

  “Baby,” I said, “you have a lot of good experience. And you’re so smart. But without a GED—I don’t know—”

  He looked at me, not unkindly. “What? I can handle it. Just tell me.”

  “A lot of jobs like to see high school degrees,” I said, “especially if the applicant has a record.”

  “But the ice factory hired me.”

  “Yeah, but the jobs you want aren’t at the ice factory.”

  He nodded, stone-faced.

  “Baby,” I said, “what do you really want to do, most of all?”

  He looked at me like I was wasting his time. “I want to be normal. I want to be done with this in-between part,” he said. “Not locked up, not unlocked-up. There’s no word for it, really, except ‘normal.’”

  “You’re normal, Baby,” I said.

  He threw his head back and sighed. “I wish I had, you know, a calling. Like you. You’re called to do this nun thing.”

  It sounded true when he said it.

  “You want to become a nun?” I said. “Because we’d love to have you.”

  He laughed, blushed, shook his head.

  “You love art,” I said. “You could be an artist.”

  “No way.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Art is for rich people. And I’m not even good enough.”

  “That’s not true. None of that is true,” I said, “You could get your GED, then go to school for it. For painting or sculpting or photography or anything. All you have to do is decide.”

  I studied his face as he considered it: like he’d come across a way to add whole years to his life.

  * * *

  The abbess was thrilled. She filed the paperwork the next day. “The GED is your ticket to a brighter future!” she told Baby. You’re on the plane, I thought.

  He switched his work schedule around to make time for classes, and he went with Eileen to the adult education center. The classes were self-paced. “One thing to watch out for is absolutes,” I heard Eileen tell him, once. They were studying on the corduroy couch. “If one of the choices is an absolute, you can eliminate it.”

  Baby said something I couldn’t hear.

  “Anything with an extreme word, like ‘always,’ or ‘never,’ or ‘only.’ You can just go ahead and cross it out.”

  After a minute, she said, “Yeah. There aren’t a lot of alwayses in the world.”

  51.

  In November, the students’ parents came with visitors’ badges to talk to me about their daughters. I sat across from the mothers and fathers at a long table in the gym for fifteen minutes at a time. “Keep it brief, keep it positive, keep it rolling,” the principal had advised us. “‘Everyone starts somewhere’—that’s what you can tell any parent who’s disappointed in their kid.”

  These conversations were intimate, vulnerable, the closest I’d ever come to hearing a stranger’s con
fession. The parents came with their pride, or their concerns, and in some cases, their complicated shame. They were anxious. In one conversation, a mother and father asked about their daughter’s attention span—did she seem easily distracted?—and then they wept with gratitude when the answer was no, not any more so than the other girls.

  Samantha’s mother confided to me that Samantha was having a hard time. Other teachers had said her daughter “talked without authorization,” fell asleep in class, had trouble focusing. I told her the truth: I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary in geometry.

  Samantha was also having difficulty, her mother said, with her classmates. On the soccer field, Samantha had been called names, so she quit soccer. But the girls were still mean on the bus and in the hallways and the gym changing room, and Samantha could not avoid them.

  Samantha had always been a weird girl, her mother told me, leaning forward confidingly. Always unconcerned with being like everyone else. “I don’t understand it,” she said.

  I listened and did not interrupt. I remembered what it was like to be someone’s daughter, the way a parent might look at you, all shame and rage, convinced your mission was to disgrace you both. It’s how my father looked at me when I told him I was devoting my life to the church. He took it personally. He thought I was insane.

  I told Samantha’s mother I would look after Samantha. I told her that in my experience, there was nothing worse than feeling left out.

  * * *

  The parents kept coming. Over and over, I reviewed my rules, explained my policies, heard the parents’ admissions of guilt and distressing observations and all-consuming fears. I didn’t know what it was like, to be a parent, but I knew how to worry, and what it might help to hear. Besides, I got to know their daughters as people, not as daughters. There was a difference.