Agatha of Little Neon Page 17

  “Tim Gary!” I called.

  He looked down. It seemed to take him a second to remember who I was.

  “What’re you doing?” I yelled.

  “Huh?”

  “What! Are! You! Doing!”

  He didn’t answer. He turned back to the ladder, and I climbed up to meet him. The rungs of the ladder were muddy where he’d stepped, but I didn’t care. I held tight and lifted one foot at a time. When I reached the steel platform, I hauled myself up and sat next to him.

  “I didn’t know you could climb like that,” Tim Gary said.

  “Me neither,” I said. I was out of breath.

  We sat facing all of Woonsocket, lit up by streetlamps and other people’s porch lights, and Tim Gary swung his legs and told me how things used to be. A century ago, on the other side of the river, there’d been rubber and textile mills, back when those were industries on which you could build a town. Last he knew, most of the mills were condominiums now. And there used to be a pizza-by-the-slice place he loved, just beyond the trees, near where he had lived with his ex-wife. Now it was a dry cleaner’s.

  It made me smile to picture a younger Tim Gary, with more hair and more muscle and a whole jaw, a napkin tucked in his collar and a slice of pizza propped up in front of his face. But then this also made me sad.

  Off to the east beyond the evergreens I could see the very top of the turbines, so that when each blade rose up I caught just a glimpse before it sank again.

  “What was it like?” I asked. “Living alone, I mean. After—when you—”

  “After my wife left?” he said, and I nodded.

  Back then, his loneliness was enough to rot a bag of sugar. He told me he fell in love with anyone who asked him how his day was going. After his surgery he drove himself to the mouth doctor and the cancer doctor and the bone doctor, and when he left he wanted so sorely to tell someone whatever it was the doctors had said. “I tried to tell the checkout boy at the hardware store,” he said, “but it was not as interesting to him as I hoped.” It was all Tim Gary could do each day to go stand among the wrenches and work at being alone. He had never learned how not to need someone.

  “At the doctor’s, I kept getting good news,” he said. “And I was supposed to be happy. But can I tell you something?” I watched him try to find a way to say it. “Ever since then—”

  I waited.

  “It’s not that it’s any one thing—” He sighed. “Well. It’s just. I don’t think I have the constitution for it. For being alive.”

  He turned to look at me. I touched his shoulder. There were ways, I knew, to tide a man over. My sisters were very skilled at steering unhappy men toward God. They could give a man a why.

  But whys can leak from you, I knew. You couldn’t help it. You had hope, and then it slipped away. You belonged somewhere, and then you didn’t.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I understand.”

  “I wonder if I’ll be any better at being dead.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. “When the time comes, I think you’re going to be a smash hit in heaven,” I said after a moment. “A household name.”

  He smiled.

  “But not for a long time,” I added. “You’ve got to stick around. Don’t you want to find out what else they’ll build in Woonsocket?”

  “Condominiums,” he said.

  “Condominiums,” I agreed.

  He said, not unkindly, “You know, you’re lucky, Agatha, to have them. Frances and Therese and Mary Lucille.”

  I nodded; I knew that this had once been true. I’ve never be able to explain, even to myself, why it couldn’t be made true again.

  I worked my throat and leaned to spit a loogie onto the grass below. I could watch it drop part of the way, but it disappeared in the dark and I couldn’t see where it landed. After a moment Tim Gary spat, too. It didn’t feel like catharsis, but it was something to do.

  I pointed east across the field and asked Tim Gary if he could see the turbines beyond the trees. He couldn’t make them out, so I pointed and said, “There, right there,” and he stared hard and said, “Where?” and “Where?” and then, “Oh, oh!”

  We sat, quiet, and watched the blades slice the night. I knew Tim Gary was waiting for me to speak, but I couldn’t come up with a pithy moral to impart. It took me months to figure out what I should have said, and longer to forgive myself for not saying it: when it comes to purpose or meaning or reasons to live, all we can hope for is something akin to that “Oh, oh!”

  I tried to count the turns of the moonlit blades, but the longer I looked, the more one blurred into the next, and I lost track and gave up. Or I gave up and then lost track; I’m not sure which.

  PART III

  OBEDIENCE

  69.

  There was much I could not control, and among these things were allergens: dust and ragweed and grass. Also, pollen. Woonsocket’s air was crummy with pollen. I shot my nasal cavity with saline, watched it drip out the other side. At night I propped my pillows up so I could breathe.

  And then one night I felt a hair on my chin.

  I switched on the light and made everyone else come close to stroke it. I was worried I was imagining it, but they confirmed that yes, one dark, wiry hair had arrived.

  It was as if all my life had been leading to the growth of this little hair. But after the joy, guilt rushed in: I hadn’t spoken to Mother Roberta in months. This wasn’t for lack of a telephone or time or desire—I thought of her often, yes, and wondered how she was, even thought to call her, but hadn’t. I was busy, and tired.

  We called Mother Roberta in the morning, all of us staring at the speakerphone.

  We were patched through. When she came to the phone, she said, “This is Roberta.”

  My heart swelled. The sound of her voice, the delight in her tone—it was like being reintroduced to myself. The overhead light seemed warmer, the walls less far away.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called. I should have,” she said to us. “I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now.”

  “What news,” I said.

  “My jubilee,” she said. “It’s going to be my Golden Jubilee.”

  Mother Roberta had given fifty years to the church. She had watched the rise of a half-dozen popes and too many bishops. She’d witnessed the turmoil of Vatican II. For decades she had watched as men she knew, men of holy devotion, men who counseled others in matters of faith, were revealed to be stupid or depraved. She had prayed a million rosaries, mentored a thousand young religious sisters. Fifty trips around the sun. More than eighteen thousand days.

  “They’re throwing me a party,” she said. “Here at the home. They insisted. There’ll be a Mass, and a potluck.”

  Mary Lucille said, “How special! How nice.”

  “Say you’ll come,” she said. “Come home and visit.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Therese said. “It’s a long trip.”

  The four of us were looking at the phone and not at each other. But when she said, “I’m getting old,” we glanced up, and all our hesitation was eclipsed by guilt. I could imagine her with the portable phone, vulnerable on the couch: the tiny arms and the slump of her shoulders, the kinked fingers, the bulbs of her knuckles.

  Frances told her we’d be there. I felt a surge of joy: it might be nice for the four of us to journey somewhere together, the way we used to. I wanted us to return to Mother Roberta and be able to say we had been loyal and loving, so at the end of her life, when she looked down from her seat at the heavenly dais and listed the people on earth she most wanted to join her in heaven, our names would be among the first.

  * * *

  We called the abbess and asked if she was willing to come stay at Little Neon while we drove to Lackawanna. She said yes, but for three days only, and we were not permitted to use the white van for non-Neon-related travel.

  And so, the week after Easter, we rented a car. Our first time, and we were plainly thrilled. For forty-three dollars p
lus the price of gas, we had a car wide as a ship. It was far fancier and cleaner and quieter than the big white van or the red Mercury Villager we’d driven in Lackawanna. This was a blue four-door sedan, with plush interior and an air conditioner that we put on full blast without a second thought. Everything about the car was beautiful: the glint of the trunk, the dashboard’s slope, the sound of the lock.

  “What kind of engine?” Therese asked the rental car agent. He wore a green vest and looked bored.

  “Big one,” he said.

  When Frances told him how excited we were, to be heading to our dear friend’s jubilee in this beautiful car, he said, “Yeah. Here’s the keys.”

  We piled in, and Therese started it up. “Oh, man. Listen to her—”

  “We know, we know,” Mary Lucille said. “Listen to her purr.”

  * * *

  In the days before our trip, the four of us mentioned the jubilee in every conversation we had. At school I told my students I’d be gone for a couple of days, and they’d have a substitute, because I would be out of town, attending my dear friend’s jubilee. They were expected to be well-behaved and keep up with their assignments while I was at my dear friend’s jubilee. I’d collect their homework after I got back from my dear friend’s jubilee.

  At the dinner table, the Neons grew tired of hearing about it. They stared at the wall while we talked. Over goulash we speculated about what food might be at our dear friend’s jubilee. Washing the dishes, we hoped for fine weather for our dear friend’s jubilee. Oh, on the way to our dear friend’s jubilee, we’d have to stop at the fishmonger’s in Lackawanna to pick up blue crab to bring to the potluck that would follow our dear friend’s jubilee.

  “Sisters,” Pete said, his eyes like bullets. “Please. Enough about the jubilee.”

  * * *

  My head continued to hum with excitement. It had been many months since I’d seen Mother Roberta flash those gleaming false teeth. I could still picture her smile, and the brackish blue skin on the tops of her hands. But I’d forgotten the precise slump of her back, the way she looked me in the eye.

  I shuddered to picture the way Father Thaddeus’s belly pushed against his shirt, the wispy hairs atop his head.

  The night before the trip, I gathered my cold cream and toothpaste and nasal decongestant spray. I slipped nylons and pairs of underwear into a duffel bag. And then, kneeling next to the others, I joined them in prayer. We prayed for the abbess and Tim Gary and Pete and Eileen and Baby and my students and the substitute, and we prayed for Horse and Lawnmower Jill, and then we asked for a safe trip, and fine weather, no trouble from the car. And we asked that this weekend Mother Roberta might feel like no one was missing and nothing was out of place.

  * * *

  While the others slept, I heard noise downstairs. I went down in my nightgown and found Tim Gary at the kitchen table, drinking apple juice and listening to a handheld radio. When he saw me in the doorway, he sat up straight and switched the radio off.

  “Sorry—was it too loud?” he said.

  I said no, I just wondered what the sound was. He told me he’d found it at the swap store and given up his headphones for it. “Now that guy has headphones but no radio, and I have a radio but no headphones,” he said. He knew it was old-fashioned, but he liked to listen to the requests and dedications on the easy-listening channel.

  He switched it back on, and we waited for the song to end. Then DJ Shezeen let us know that the next song was a request from Maisie. “This one is for Maisie’s true love, Ridge. Ridge, Maisie’s thinking of you and missing you from all the way in sunny Santa Barbara. She wants you to know she’s coming home to you soon.” The song started, and I didn’t recognize it.

  I asked Tim Gary if he would be all right while we were away, and he said he’d be busy with work. “But I have some videotapes I’ve been meaning to watch, and I might walk down to the tire and back. Maybe Pete will want to join.” He smiled at me.

  That sounds nice, I said. I was eager for reassurance that he’d be all right, and this was enough.

  The next request was from someone named PJ. He wanted it to go out to his roommate. “Danny, if you’re listening, PJ wants you to please stop and pick up trash bags on your way home. He would like it if they were the kind with the drawstring.”

  70.

  We left at dawn in our sleek blue car as soon as the abbess showed up. She told us to drive safely and asked where we would be staying, in case she needed to call us. The Super 8, Therese said, and then she got behind the wheel and we were flying out of the driveway, and soon we were on the interstate, speeding ahead. The thrill of the open road! I pressed my face to the window and watched the world pass us by.

  On our way out of Woonsocket, we passed the wind turbines, and Therese slowed down in the right lane so we could look. In all our time in Woonsocket, I’d never seen the turbines look so big and graceful. How proud they looked! I should have asked Tim Gary how it worked, how the wind could be turned into something else while the turbines stayed in place.

  Therese drove for many hours. She clucked her tongue at slow-moving vehicles. In Massachusetts, we stopped for lunch. We’d packed provisions: cold sausages in cans and hot coffee from a thermos. Someone distributed wedges of an orange.

  At a picnic table across the parking lot sat a group of boys in scouting vests. They were slumped over their lunches, and they made no noise. A fat one stood and walked to the toilets; when he was gone, the others broke into whispers and jeers. Uneasy, we watched them snicker to each other, and knew without hearing that they were mocking him when they had the chance. When the fat one came back to the table, the boys returned to their boxes of juice, a great play of innocence.

  Then we watched the boys fill a yellow bus and go. The jump and rattle of the engine as it hurtled on and disappeared behind the trees.

  We shook our heads and wiped our hands and fastened our seatbelts. How horrible, how merciful, the ways we are, each of us, oblivious to so much of the hurt in the world.

  * * *

  To pass the time, we listened to public broadcasting. The news: men were murdering, sea levels were rising, deer were dying, celebrities were giving birth.

  Mary Lucille and I had a thumb war, which ended in a draw after Mary Lucille issued allegations of foul play.

  Therese hushed us and turned up the volume: the broadcaster was speaking about priests in another city.

  “Can we please turn this off,” Mary Lucille said.

  It was anguish to listen to, but I felt no shock. We’d never said much to each other about the news reports, not even when we were alone in the attic. There were only ever moments of outrage that would flare out, and then we would go to bed.

  Mary Lucille leaned forward from the back seat to switch it off, but Therese swatted her hand away from the dial. “To date, the Vatican has paid more then two-point-six billion dollars in settlements,” the broadcaster said.

  “Two billion dollars,” Frances said, eyes wide. “Oh, this is so much worse than I thought.”

  “Oh, I don’t like listening to this stuff,” Mary Lucille said. “Turn it off.”

  “Turning it off won’t help,” Therese said.

  The broadcaster listed parishes and priests. After a moment, he went to a commercial, and Therese hit the dial.

  The car was silent for a painful moment, and I felt a familiar eddy start up inside me, a private countercurrent of rage. They had not imagined consequences, these priests, these men who could baptize and anoint and transubstantiate, men who could stand at the pulpit and speak of temptation, then, warped by a sense of impunity, do what they wanted in the world, including rape in the middle of the day, then sit on the other side of the confession box and listen to people list their sins. They had believed they were beyond reproach. And in a way, they were right, because for so long, nothing happened to these men. Reassignments, maybe, and resignations, but nothing like reproach.

  I said, “And where is the pope in
all this? Suddenly he has nothing to say?”

  Frances turned to frown at me. “Agatha. Show some respect,” she said.

  “Agatha’s right,” Therese said, and she glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “What a mess these men have made.”

  “Oh, it’s not for us to say,” Mary Lucille said. “Who are we to judge?”

  I suppose, for her, deference was all wrapped up with obedience. That’s what the vow meant in her mind. But I was all out of deference.

  * * *

  In Stockbridge, we stopped for gas. When the tank was full, we pulled out onto the street, next to one of those huge trucks that looked like it could be used to invade a country. Frances had to gun it when the light turned so she could pull out ahead of the big truck and get back on the highway.

  The truck driver was not pleased.

  He honked like mad. He revved his engine so his headlights were inches from our bumper. We turned back to see the looming hood of the truck, close and huge. My heart raced. This was how we would die, I thought. The man was yelling things we couldn’t hear, but we watched his teeth snarl, his fist shake. He was a stocky man, with a head wider than it was tall.

  On the highway he continued to tail us, so close that if Therese were to take her foot off the accelerator, the hood of his truck would be in our trunk, and our seat belts would lacerate our torsos, and we would surely die.

  “Let him pass,” Frances told Therese. “Pull over.”

  So Therese steered onto the shoulder and slowed to a stop. But then we watched in horror as the truck driver did the same and parked in front of us.

  In a flash his door was open and he flung himself onto the road, charging toward us with wild eyes. Therese locked the doors. The four of us panted with fear. In the backseat Mary Lucille and I held hands tight tight tight.

  We heard him yell: “You fucking cut me off again—”