Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  I proposed penance—ways their daughters might improve before the end of the term, opportunities for extra credit.

  All was not lost, I told them; there was still time for their daughters to do well. But it was hard to look into the faces of these people a decade older than me and believe I was in any position to reassure them. “There is no time for nothing,” I told them, and passed it off as if it was my own invention, as if it was something I said all the time. This was part of the way Mother Roberta had loved us: she had taught us everything and never asked for credit.

  The parents were filled with resolve, as if they were the ones who’d be taking the final exam. I shook their hands and watched them go.

  What work it must be, to have a daughter. My own mother, I remembered as guarded, anxious, easily distracted. I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to be, as a teacher, and as a woman, some version of Mother Roberta: attentive, wise, beloved. But tough, too, the way she was—full of conviction. The sort of person you’d think about as you fell asleep, comforted to remember that in this world of bad luck and rising sea levels and impossible pain, at least, thank God, there was her.

  52.

  Frances saw a couple of rabbits eating the radicchio she’d planted in the backyard, which is how she remembered she’d planted radicchio in the backyard. She went outside to shoo them away and came back pink-cheeked, bearing a bucketful of radicchio heads, hardy leaves the color of wine.

  I had thought Frances might grow radishes, leafy greens, carrots, squash. But because she had, months ago, planted radicchio seeds and then promptly given up on growing anything else, we now had a bounty of radicchio. We ate radicchio for weeks. We ate radicchio soup; peanut butter and pickled radicchio sandwiches; chopped radicchio salad with raisins, ham, and nuts; radicchio and eggs; radicchio on rice; radicchio radicchio radicchio.

  * * *

  I returned home late after my last parent conference. Everyone was asleep, and there was nothing in the fridge besides radicchio slaw and a bottle of soy sauce and four jars of mustard. I ate crackers from the pantry. When I opened the freezer to pop ice from a tray, I found—underneath the frozen peas and behind a gray lump of forgotten meat—a Popsicle in plastic.

  I didn’t wait for permission. I ripped open the wrapper. It was a twin-pop, purple, my favorite flavor.

  Tim Gary appeared in the doorway. He looked at the Popsicle, then at me. He said, “They tried to make me a radicchio smoothie.”

  I split the Popsicle in half. We sat together and I asked him about his day. He told me he couldn’t complain, and I said of course he could, and he said, “Okay. Well. A waitress at the restaurant, her name’s Raquelle. I was—oh, I liked her. I had a little crush. She’s got this long, dark, curly hair, and she’s a nice girl. She’s always laughing with the other guys. I just thought she was pretty. But, so, then she asked me why I was always looking at her when I was supposed to be watching the timer on the shrimp. She told me, ‘Stop staring, I don’t sell blow anymore.’”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what blow was.

  “And I told her I didn’t want any blow, honest, I just thought she was pretty,” he went on, “and she rolled her eyes and told me I’d overcooked the shrimp.”

  I asked Tim Gary if it was true, if he’d really overcooked the shrimp, and he said that wasn’t the point. “Just hurt my feelings, is all.”

  I nodded. I thought about how many more times Tim Gary must have felt glum and alone and never said anything than times he did. I pictured a pecan pie with only a single pecan taken from the top: that pecan was all the times he spoke up.

  “But I’ll get over it,” he said.

  “You have bigger fish to fry,” I said, “like swordfish.”

  He smiled. Purple juice dripped down his arm and onto the floor. We finished our Popsicles. In the morning, Therese grumbled and took a wet sponge to the sticky spot on the linoleum. “We’ll get ants, if you don’t learn to clean up after yourselves,” she said. “Is that what you want?” She said it as if having ants was the worst of all possible fates.

  53.

  Most days, Nadia and I ate lunch together in the fifth-floor chapel. We had the whole place to ourselves. It was much quieter than the teachers’ lounge, and there was excellent light.

  Nadia sometimes came to lunch smelling like vinegar. She was in charge of the photography club, and they used acetic acid to develop the film. The club met in the classroom that used to be the woodshop. They’d converted the supply closet into a darkroom, and that’s where Nadia was when she wasn’t teaching: agitating film in the dark.

  At first there were twelve girls and only two cameras. But Nadia met with the student activities director, then the assistant principal, then the other assistant principal, then the treasurer, then the principal, and she demanded money for additional cameras. They all thought it was a waste. They told her most of the fine-arts budget had been allocated to the drama club’s production of Bye Bye Birdie. “Poodle skirts aren’t cheap,” she said, imitating the principal in a low baritone, and I laughed and laughed. But Nadia was persistent. She annoyed the principal so much that he got fed up and finally okayed the purchase of ten secondhand cameras.

  Sometimes we talked the whole lunch period. Other times, we didn’t say much, and Nadia sat on the hardwood floor, sipped soup, graded homework, flipped through the pages of a magazine. Every now and again she’d read aloud a sentence she hated or liked. I liked to sit near the window and watch the sixth-period gym class play touch football. The girls ran about, pink-cheeked, serious. Some of them moved like gazelles, all limbs and grace, and some of them charged headfirst in whatever direction they chose, but there was one girl who didn’t move much. She stayed still and watched everyone run past her and lob the ball to each other in perfect arcs, and then, arms flung ahead, the other girls went on their chase, desperate to grab the jersey of the one who’d made the catch.

  54.

  The week before Thanksgiving, Therese drove Tim Gary to the doctor in the big white van.

  A routine exam, he told us at dinner, as we ate tuna noodle casserole. From the veins in both elbows, a nurse had siphoned vials of blood. I imagined the cold fingers of the doctor probing the soft spot where half Tim Gary’s jaw used to be, feeling the contours of every last lymph node. The doctor had pressed and rubbed Tim Gary’s tongue, stroked his cheeks from the inside. The tonsils were poked, the pharynx and larynx examined with a camera shoved down his throat.

  “Cool,” Baby said.

  “Tim Gary was very brave,” Therese said.

  “I gagged,” Tim Gary said. “I wanted to die.”

  “No you didn’t,” Frances insisted. “You don’t want to die. That’s why you went to the doctor.”

  Tim Gary shrugged. “It’s just an expression,” he said. He slipped a splinter of tuna into his mouth and worked to swallow.

  I watched my sisters launch into speeches about the value of suffering. Frances spat off mentions of Job; Therese recited sections of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Mary Lucille summarized parables involving leprosy and difficulties in animal husbandry, challenges that were easily surmounted with the help of the Lord.

  It’s true that many people could learn a thing or two from being dealt a dose of hardship, but I didn’t feel that Tim Gary was one of them. I looked at the cotton in the crooks of his elbows where blood had been drawn, watched the way he lifted his straw in and out of his milk.

  Mary Lucille asked him how close he was to being able to afford his next surgery, the one in which a doctor would rebuild his jaw with a piece of bone from his leg.

  “Oh, I’ll never be able to afford it,” he said. “It’s a half a million dollars, that surgery.”

  “Well, what did the doctor say about your jaw?” Pete asked. “Did everything seem normal?”

  Tim Gary nodded. “As normal as any other jaw that’s half gone.”

  55.

  I never liked Thanksgiving. The colonialism, for one. T
he sad fact of the turkey skeleton sitting on the counter after the meal. There were always so many dishes to wash, and dry, and put away. Mary Lucille would get indigestion and pass gas in her sleep. I ended up so tired each year.

  But that was back when every day looked like the one before. When I started teaching, my weeks took on a different rhythm, and weekends were prized in a new way. I liked my students, but teaching wore me out, and Thanksgiving was a little reprieve. The day before the holiday, I distributed pop quizzes to take up time but never bothered to grade them.

  After the final bell rang, I rushed to leave. Zipped my coat, crammed my feet in boots. I had to run up to the fifth-floor chapel, where I’d left my thermos at lunch. I took the stairs two at a time.

  And then at the landing I came to a halt.

  In the corner, two girls were kissing. One of them was Samantha, and one of them was a girl I didn’t recognize. They didn’t know I was there.

  My heart pounded from the climb. Everything looked a little unreal. I’d never been there at this hour: it was the first time I’d seen the light look so lovely, laid across the wall at that precise angle.

  They kept kissing, eyes closed, moving their heads the way pigeons do. They slipped their hands all over each other. It was mystifying. How long had they been at it up here? I kept thinking they’d pull away from each other—surely they had to stop and catch their breath, I thought. But they didn’t.

  I cleared my throat.

  Samantha turned her head. “Shit,” she said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Oh, God,” the other girl said. “Let’s go. We’re going.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder. They lowered their heads and started to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” Samantha said, voice faint. She rushed past me.

  “Wait,” I said. I knew I was supposed to be the teacher, the one who had the answers, but you couldn’t make a lesson plan for something like this. I felt ashamed for having found them. I had to find something to say, but it was easier to think of something to do. And I wanted to do the merciful thing.

  I found my thermos under a chair and headed for the stairs. I said, “It’s okay. I’ll go.” And I ran. I left them alone.

  * * *

  Later it was as if I’d imagined the whole scene. I was almost able to convince myself I’d made it up, just as I’d been almost able, when I was younger, to forget that women were what I wanted. There were so many young loves I did not consummate. I became very good at not thinking those thoughts anymore. It wasn’t hard. You could learn to live without a part of yourself. You could live without a lot of parts of yourself.

  I did. For years, I lived like this. And then I started to yearn for what I’d lost.

  56.

  I wasn’t going to mention Samantha to the others, but then while we watched the weather report at night, Therese asked what happened at school that day. Keeping it from them felt like too big a lie.

  “Well. I came across two girls—uh, kissing,” I said. “In the chapel.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Therese said.

  Frances said I was obligated to report it. “They’re young,” she said. “You have to intervene when they’re young, or it’s a lot harder to fix. I used to know a girl who told everyone she was gay, and then her mother sent her to the right hospital, she saw a doctor, and it took years, but—it can be fixed.” She smiled at me and turned back to the TV, where yellow and green blotches were moving forward and back across a map of Rhode Island.

  “Don’t worry,” Mary Lucille said. “Someday they’ll look back and be glad you helped them.”

  * * *

  In class on Monday, I avoided Samantha’s eyes, and she avoided mine. I felt stripped of all authority. I could only hope that enough time would pass that we’d be able to act as if nothing had happened.

  57.

  The next week I went on a field trip to the planetarium, both because Nadia asked me and because I wanted to hear what things were like on other planets.

  The Providence Planetarium was in the basement of the Natural History Museum. As planetaria go, it wasn’t much, but it was a bargain. Nadia said the planetarium in Boston had one of the most advanced fiber-optic projectors in the world, but in Providence a girl could get in for two dollars, and for three dollars, admission would include a packet of astronaut ice cream in one of two flavors.

  The school did not spring for the ice cream.

  Nadia had been teaching the girls in grade eleven about the universe—“Or,” she said, “parts of it, anyway.” If you chaperoned, a substitute took your classes for the day, and the gym teacher, Mr. Klamm, was filling in for me. He smiled a lot and had good posture and knew nothing about math.

  On the bus, Nadia and I sat up front. The girls yelled and jeered, and when I stood to take attendance, I had to whistle to get them to quiet down. Most of the girls were girls I’d never seen, and one was Samantha. She sat alone, with headphones on.

  The bus drove on a two-lane road past woods you could see straight through. I was trying to scrape together something to say to Nadia, but she spoke first. “I don’t really know much more about the solar system than my students do,” she said in a low voice. She’d taught herself both the biology and astronomy textbooks over the summer, as I’d done with geometry. She had finished the better part of a PhD in bioengineering, then left grad school without her degree. Now her life was worksheets. She put together lectures: she taught one class of teenage girls about the parts of the universe, and another class about the parts of the cell. She’d somehow convinced the school to let her take both classes to the planetarium. Something about photosynthesis, the sun, evolution, and life on other planets. This was not, she said, the life she’d planned for herself.

  “Do you ever regret leaving?” I asked. “Graduate school, I mean.”

  “No one ever asks me that,” she said. Instead, people wanted to know why she left. And when she told them about the thing with her advisor, they wanted to know about him. How old was he, was he attractive, was he married. Did he have tenure. Did he get to keep his job. Did he try to sleep with other students, too. Who did Nadia tell, and what did she say, and why did she wait so long.

  “I don’t regret leaving,” she said, and sighed. “But, God. I still don’t know why it took me so long. Years—years! It was hard to give up on that idea of myself.”

  I was too afraid to ask how to distinguish an idea of yourself from the real thing. I nodded. I watched a single orange Cheeto sail up and over our heads and land on the floor of the bus.

  * * *

  To enter the planetarium, we had to file down a narrow hallway past a display of stuffed and preserved red chickens, posed upright, undead. The sign said not to touch, but one bird was bald near the butt, where people had rubbed the feathers bare.

  The theater smelled like feet and marshmallows and the girls clamored for seats, except Samantha, who sat at the end of the first row.

  Back then, Pluto was still one of the planets. When, a year later, Pluto made the headlines and the planets went from nine to eight, I was many miles from Rhode Island, and I thought of Nadia and how she’d saved a seat for me in the planetarium, in the second row. There was an ache in my chest when I wondered if she thought of me, too.

  We sat in the dark. The show started after brief advertisements for a divorce lawyer and a new kind of potato chip. Then there was fluty music, and the projector whirred, and on the screen was the whole universe. A hovering sprawl of galaxies, teeming with stars and gas and dust.

  How easy it was to forget myself, to vanish, as before me nebulae glowed violet and stars flared and planets circled the sun. I hadn’t expected to be so moved. Even our slim share of the cosmos, all nine planets, the way I’d always known it, was too vast to fit in my mind.

  For those forty-five minutes I surrendered to wonder. It was such a relief to give up the need to be sure about things.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure if I should,
but on the bus ride home, I told Nadia about Samantha, that I’d found her kissing another girl. I couldn’t get past the idea that it was wrong. I’m not sure what I was hoping she would say.

  She looked at me, waiting for more. “And?”

  “And, I don’t know. Is there a rule about kissing?”

  “Probably. But so what?”

  The way she said it, it made me feel cared for. It was like a kind of permission. She made it seem okay that I was whatever I was, too.

  I looked out the window. “Yeah, so what,” I said. “So what.”

  58.

  And then it was Advent, the season of beginnings, the season of gifts. The first Friday’s artist-within session, we bowed hardy pine branches to make Advent wreaths, and for days our fingers were tacky with sap. We sold the wreaths to parishioners and gave the money to the rectory. Each one was sold, taken to brown on other people’s kitchen tables, and we were glad to see them go.

  * * *

  The boiler in the basement of St. Gertrude’s had been around for forty-eight winters, since before Vatican II. It was a complicated thing, and real temperamental. It got easily worked up and then had a hard time calming down. At night, Father Steve kept the doors of the church unlocked, the heat blasting, so people who needed to could come sleep in the pews.

  The morning of the Immaculate Conception, we went to Mass first thing. It was a Thursday in early December, and the world was still dark. Only Tim Gary came with us; the other Neons stayed in bed. We sat in the front row, like always. When the bells rang, we startled. We were struggling to stay awake. The heat made us drowsy; we hadn’t had coffee; we bit our tongues and pinched each other’s elbows.