Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  There were no more than ten people in the pews, even though it was a feast day, a day of obligation. The Mass was intended to celebrate the miracle of the Virgin Mary getting made: that Saint Joachim and Saint Anne loved each other and made a little sinless embryo that’d become a sinless girl who’d grow up to become the sinless womb in which the Lord gestated, the sinless womb from which the Lord came crying.

  He read from Luke: the Annunciation, the moment when Mary is told she’s pregnant with the son of God. Father Steve seemed emotional; his voice broke when he read Mary’s consent, the last words of the passage: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”

  The homily was about abortion. Father Steve called it genocide. He invited everyone to join the group of parish members who drove to the women’s health clinic in Providence each Saturday to pray and stick signs in the ground and hand out pamphlets.

  “Let’s join them,” Mary Lucille whispered to us.

  “Of course,” Frances said, and Therese nodded without turning her head.

  Maybe that’s when I started to wonder about their priorities, the ways they wanted to spend their time. But it might have been earlier. Either way, it was a relief that I didn’t have to come up with something to say. I knew I was supposed to agree with Father Steve and my sisters, but I was thinking of my mother, and the times I rubbed her swollen ankles when she was pregnant with my brother. How she’d been made to feel cruel to want anything other than her lot in life. And I was thinking of mercy, how it can make gravity lift, so sinners float awhile, and every fallen leaf returns to its mother tree and is welcomed back to the branches of the living.

  The sun had risen by the time we stood to receive Communion, and it poured through the stained glass and made everything glow.

  59.

  I slipped dozens of Scantrons into grading machines, listened to the wrong answers go click click click click click. And then my first semester was done.

  I had two weeks in which to learn the second semester of geometry, which was all congruence and proportionality and ratios. But I could only read the geometry textbook for a few hours a morning, or I turned irritable. It was hard to know what to do with all the rest of my time. I listened to Therese practice her lecture for the next week’s Bible study, about the Book of Esther. I soaked and boiled beans. I went walking and kept walking.

  * * *

  Our sculptures came back from the kiln, some in pieces. Frances’s pinch pot was broken in half, and Mary Lucille’s tiny Christina the Astonishing had exploded into a thousand pieces. Mary Lucille accepted the news stoically. She had already successfully made, she told me, a half-dozen figurines, each the size of chess pieces. She hoped to sell them in the parish gift shop.

  My cocktail weenie had cooked without breaking, and I painted it, which required my utmost concentration, the slightest and most tender of brushstrokes: the pink mouth fine as thread, the wee fingers and thumbs. I hated the wee fingers and thumbs, but otherwise I enjoyed staring at the weenie and deciding what to do to make it look like something else.

  I spent a lot of time that December thinking about resemblance, the fraught relationship between a thing and its copy. The little people Mary Lucille and I made were all replicas, some ugly, of unknowable originals. We could get only as close as the copy, and the copy was never enough: her miniature Joan and Catherine and Clare stood all day in the gift shop display case. They did not speak or perform miracles; they only gazed out all day from behind glass.

  And they did not sell, much to her resentment. Deacon Greg told her no one had any need for knickknacks. “You could brew kombucha,” he said. “A growler of kombucha makes a great gift. Very popular. Or you could knit socks. Things people actually use.”

  But where was the good in making things that would not last? I wanted to create things that would outlive me. I wanted to pay homage to the women I admired: Quiteria, who was beheaded after she refused to marry a man; Lidwina, who ice-skated; Hildegard, who knew her science. And Apollonia, who’d had all her teeth knocked out by a mob of people who didn’t believe in God.

  When by accident Mary Lucille made a blue-faced Virgin Mary (she’d missed the edge of the veil with her brush), she gave the figurine to Mickey, the cashier at the Tedeschi. By then, Mickey was eight months pregnant with a baby she did not want.

  Mary Lucille told her, “Mary will watch over you and your child.”

  Mickey said, “Mary looks like she’s queasy at the thought.”

  Mary Lucille said she probably just had a little morning sickness.

  Mickey looked at the little face. She said, “Poor Mary. She didn’t even get to fuck first.” She placed the Virgin on top of the cash register.

  60.

  The day it snowed eight inches in Woonsocket, the four of us found Lawnmower Jill slumped in the alley behind the library, her mower parked beside her, a white plastic Tedeschi bag in her lap. It’d been months since we’d seen her last.

  “Lawnmower Jill!” Frances called, but she didn’t lift her head.

  When we knelt next to her, Lawnmower Jill roused and asked us, “Sisters, how does the zebra escape from the belly of the wolf?”

  We shook our heads; we did not know. It was a few days before Christmas, and Woonsocket was gray and coated in ice. Lawnmower Jill wiped her pink nose with a chapped bare hand.

  She told us: “Limb by limb.”

  Frances reminded Lawnmower Jill that wolves did not usually eat zebras.

  Lawnmower Jill said, “What about a little baby? How do you know wolves don’t eat the zebra babies?”

  We confessed: it was possible. Who could say what went on in the belly of the wolf?

  Lawnmower Jill was drunk on Narragansetts and high on something we couldn’t name, but this didn’t make her observation any less true. Every escape happens one inch at a time.

  Therese said, “Where are you living these days? Let’s get you somewhere warm.”

  But Lawnmower Jill ignored her. She told us she had good news. She had just been hired to sell jewelry. When we asked where, she said, “The jewelry store.” Tomorrow would be her first day.

  We knew of no jeweler in Woonsocket. In Woonsocket there were no jobs for people looking, but it didn’t matter, because the people didn’t look.

  Therese said, “Which store?”

  Lawnmower Jill said, “A new one. Brand-new. Sisters, will you help me find something beautiful to wear?”

  We were glad to see her, but we had a million errands, Frances told her. We had to do a million things.

  Lawnmower Jill cocked her head. “Like what?”

  “Church business,” Frances said. “We have to shovel the parish driveway.” There were also private matters: we needed to buy antacid at the Tedeschi, explain our way out of Blockbuster fees, pick up prescriptions, get a new light bulb from the hardware store. “Maybe you can come over for dinner one day soon,” Frances said.

  Lawnmower Jill rolled her eyes. “Let’s go,” she said, and stood to straddle her mower. “I’ll help you shovel the driveway if you help me with a dress.”

  We hated the snow and we hated relocating it. Lawnmower Jill, tall and strong as she was, could clear it all with ease, we knew. And so we nodded, said that sounded fair.

  “But you can’t drive,” Mary Lucille said. “You’re in no state.”

  When Lawnmower Jill smiled, it seemed she was trying to give each yellow tooth some air. “I’m in my best state, Sisters,” she said. “Meet me at the thrift.” She fired up her lawnmower, and the dashboard glowed with a constellation of warning lights that went out one by one.

  * * *

  She picked first a dress of velvet, and we said, “Velvet’s hard to clean.”

  The cotton was too sheer; the poplin had a hole.

  We showed her blazers. We brought blouses with collars and bows.

  “Too stuffy,” she said.

  Then we found, in a crowded rack, a shift dress in na
vy nylon. Knee-length, with flattering seams at the waist and bust. There were chalky rings around the armholes, but that was nothing a soak couldn’t fix.

  We knocked twice on the changing room door. Mary Lucille said, “You’re going to like this one.” There was no response.

  Frances said, “It’s perfect. Here, look.”

  When at last she opened the door, Lawnmower Jill was in a sequined dress: sleeveless and covered in a million twinkling coins. She grinned; she twirled. Below the hem, her calves were sallow and spotted with scabs, and the dress’s waist was inches too generous, her slight form overwhelmed. But when she turned and considered herself in the mirror, it looked as if the dress had healed something deep within her, and the sequins launched beams of light around the room.

  She said, “Isn’t it something? Isn’t it special?”

  Mary Lucille was the first to gush. “Oh, it’s lovely.”

  Frances said, “I’m a little worried you’ll outshine the diamonds.”

  Lawnmower Jill smiled. She said, “I don’t have any diamonds, sister.”

  Frances said, “The diamonds at the store.”

  There was a moment, then, when we could see her story catch up to her, like a shockwave of recognition that ran through her skeleton. “Yes. Yes, you’re probably right.”

  The dress went on glittering. Frances said, “Do you really have a job?”

  Lawnmower Jill’s face went wild with hurt.

  Frances said, quickly, “It’s okay if you don’t.”

  Lawnmower Jill crossed her arms and said, voice caustic and rushed, “Who told you what’s okay and what’s not?”

  We looked at each other. Mary Lucille said, “I’m sure Sister Frances didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just we miss you. We miss you and we want to make sure you’re okay and we’re sorry you left Little Neon and we love you and we pray for you all the time—”

  Lawnmower Jill’s eyes sped up and her neck flushed over. She grabbed her plastic bag from the changing room floor. She rushed past us, and we watched her go, headlong through the denim aisle, past the display of snake-like belts. She did not stop at the register, and she did not pay for her sequined frock, but went on, and wore the dress right out the doors, which parted for her and stayed wide long after she was out of sight.

  We went with our purses to pay at the counter.

  * * *

  When we walked back from the thrift, we thought we might find Lawnmower Jill parked behind the library like before, but she wasn’t there. It had started to snow, big wet globs that fell fast. Probably, we agreed, Lawnmower Jill was by the old drawbridge, or in a parking garage, or drinking the free coffee at the bank.

  As we walked, Frances asked me what ever happened with the two students who were kissing.

  “Oh, it’s out of my hands,” I said. I stared at my feet as I walked.

  “So you told someone about it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I did.” And this felt like the truth.

  Inside the Tedeschi, we found Mickey, eating fat cheese puffs. Her red apron hung over her big belly.

  Mary Lucille asked Mickey how she was feeling, and Mickey said she was feeling like shit. She still couldn’t keep her breakfast down and she couldn’t take her Ritalin and at night she couldn’t sleep.

  Frances asked her, uneasy, if there was anything we could do.

  She licked a fingertip and said, “Yeah. Cover the register while I pee.”

  Kindness isn’t any good if there’s no follow-through, so even though we didn’t know how to work the cash box or distinguish between types of tobacco, we stood before the cigarettes and the lotto tickets and looked out at the aisles. Dark pop in big bottles, beer in tall cans, white cartons of milk. Shelves stacked with bagged candy and nuts, and a million varieties of chips and jerky. We smiled to see, standing upright on the cash register, the Virgin Mary statue Frances had made. She looked calm, staring back at us.

  A bell rang when the door opened, and we looked up to see Horse. She lurched in, wearing her purple windbreaker, and flung back her dirty hood.

  “Horse,” Therese said. “Have you seen Lawnmower Jill?”

  She shook her head. “Last I saw her, she was behind the library.” Then Horse asked for Mickey. She told us, “Most days, Mickey will sell me a tall boy and a bag of Fritos for a buck.”

  “And what about the other days?” Frances said.

  Horse said on the other days she got her beer somewhere else. “But when Mickey’s here, she does right by me.”

  We looked at Horse, and we looked at each other. No one could say if what Horse said was true, but either way we knew she wasn’t supposed to be drinking beer. I offered to buy Horse some peanuts, but Horse didn’t want my charity. She wanted nothing to do with us. She said we were a bunch of cunts, and she left without saying goodbye.

  When Mickey came back from the toilet, we stepped away from the register and in the aisles bent to find antacid. We also grabbed a pouch of peach rings and a liter of root beer.

  “Anyone come by?” Mickey asked, guiding the bar codes across the laser.

  We might have bragged to her about how tough we’d been, about our refusal to let the Tedeschi name be sullied. But we didn’t want to draw attention to our good work. Gloating’s an ugly thing. And so we told her, “No one special.”

  Mickey winced at something internal, rubbed her big belly. Therese handed her some money and put the bottle of antacid in her coat pocket.

  The little bell rang when we opened the door, as if to signal that the best part of any place is the door, and the best part of any door is the other side of it. We stepped into the gray day, the snow shin-high.

  * * *

  Snow kept falling as we walked to Blockbuster, and we spoke in hushed tones about Lawnmower Jill. No coat, no gloves, no snow tires—we vowed to make sure she was somewhere warm before nightfall.

  We pulled our parkas tight and kept our eyes and noses low. We knew a trick for walking in the snow. You have to make each step deliberate—plant it hard—and put your foot where another foot has already stepped. We trudged single file, leaving only one set of prints.

  In order to have our late charges forgiven, we needed only to speak kindly to the Blockbuster girl. We knew her from Mass. She sat with her parents and her five siblings in a pew near the front and liked to chew the end of her braid. We promised we’d watch the movie we’d rented—a documentary about pandas—and return it by the end of the week.

  When we asked the girl if she’d seen Lawnmower Jill, she said she’d seen her in the library the day before. But she wasn’t supposed to talk to Lawnmower Jill; her parents had told her to keep away from junkies.

  * * *

  Mary Lucille’s fingers were bluing, and Frances and Therese were cranky (cold toes and hunger, respectively), so I volunteered to pick up a light bulb at the hardware store while the others went to the pharmacy.

  There might be women out there who can stand to hear other people complain for hours on end, but I am not one of them. I love the snow. I love the hardware store. It is easy to forget one’s need for these things: fresh air, time spent alone.

  There were so many light bulbs to choose from: round and globular, narrow and pointy, a big range of watts and volts. What number watts was right? I went home with six different bulbs.

  I walked in the snow, the cold a numbing agent. When I met up with the others, we didn’t have time to talk about the light bulb; we saw Horse on the top step of the Tedeschi with four tall cans of beer standing upright in the snow.

  “Horse,” Therese said.

  “It’s you guys!” she said. She seemed to have forgotten we were cunts.

  “That’s a lot of beer, Horse,” Frances said.

  Horse grinned and said, “Mickey’s little baby’s coming.”

  Therese said, “No, Mickey still has a month to go.”

  Horse shook her head and issued a laugh that suggested she had only a loose grip on the events transp
iring before her.

  Inside, Mickey was bent over the counter, her face pressed into the laminate.

  At first, we were gentle and sweet. “Are you in labor?” Frances asked, and Mary Lucille stroked Mickey’s hair.

  Mickey could only howl.

  And then we were no longer sweet. Everything announced itself to us with urgency: the droop of Mickey’s wet pants; her lips, pale and raw. Our knowledge of birth came from the movies. About the pain, we asked how long, what kind, how big, and her answers came as moans. I pressed the artery in her wrist and counted its swell.

  When we told Mickey we’d better take her to the hospital, she opened her eyes and seemed to notice us for the first time. “Sisters,” she said. “Am I gonna die?”

  The ambulance dispatcher reported that Woonsocket’s ambulance was stuck in the snow. “Try a cab,” the operator said. “Or a friend.”

  Empire Cab, Orange Cab, Island Cab, and Mr. Taxi quoted Frances hourlong waits. “Eight inches of snow, honey,” one of the men told her.

  Mickey spat swears like seeds.

  And then we ran to the door to see the indomitable vehicle charge down the sidewalk, bright and brave and undeterred by snow: the gleaming orange lawnmower, and oh, yes, perched upright on the seat, gallant and brilliant in her sequins, was Lawnmower Jill, her bare arms pink. We watched her come to a stop outside the Tedeschi, and Horse handed her a beer.

  We each hurried to grab a limb and proceeded to carry Mickey hammock-style out the door. The bell clanged its jolly clang and to Horse, we said, “Move,” and to Lawnmower Jill, we yelled, “Baby’s coming!”

  One of us slapped the new beer from her hand. Lawnmower Jill said, “Fuck,” and we said, “Let’s go.” There was no way the four of us could fit on the mower, so we planted the wailing Mickey atop Lawnmower Jill’s lap.