Agatha of Little Neon Page 18

  We shut our eyes and started to pray an Our Father.

  The man pressed his head to the driver’s side window. Something about us—our habits, our lips moving with our eyes shut—made him howl with laughter, and then he pounded on the glass.

  “I didn’t realize you was a bunch of nuns,” he yelled into the car. “I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I’m sorry.”

  Not every one of God’s creatures deserves your mercy—that was another thing Mother Roberta had taught us. You don’t always have to give someone an out. We had our chance to tell the man, “Your rage is the stuff of hellfire. You’re a loser, through and through. Get lost.” And I did want to, safely behind glass, but then I muttered my way through the rest of the Lord’s prayer with the others, until we landed on “Amen.”

  “I can’t hear you!” the man called. “Roll the window down!”

  But we only looked ahead and kept our mouths shut.

  “Seriously, I had no idea,” he called. He waited, and when we said nothing, he started to walk away. Before he got into his truck, he turned and gave us a smile, and said, “Hey, have a nice day! God bless.”

  It’s my belief that many men sleep too soundly at night.

  * * *

  Therese let the man get a head start, then counted to one hundred and twenty and started back on the road.

  We were on I-90 forever, until we weren’t, and Buffalo started all at once. I had not expected the surge of nostalgia. Wistful anxiety—it came and took hold of me and didn’t let go. The streets were insulated with trees, dogwoods and oaks. We crossed the Buffalo River, that puny thing. It took less than ten seconds to drive across, and we held our breath. Some people believe in holding their breath in tunnels or passing a graveyard, but that’s hogwash; better, we’ve always agreed, to hold your breath on a bridge, lest it collapse.

  Two more tedious miles, and then Lackawanna.

  Everything we saw seemed at once familiar and very strange: the pharmacy, the halal butcher, the non-halal butcher, the supermarket where we used to eat bakery donuts while shopping and then forget—we swear—to pay. I didn’t know what to do with all my longing.

  We stopped first at Burhop’s for fish.

  The fishmonger, we found, had not changed one bit. He was still young, mustached. Bright eyes. A handsome smirker. “Burhop!” Frances said, her joy so palpable that for a second I thought she might reach over the counter to kiss him.

  She had expected him to be surprised and happy to see us, but he did not seem to know we had ever left Lackawanna. “Sisters, how we doing,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  This was his standard greeting, which he used with every customer. He liked to holler and joke. The things he said were colored with insincerity, flirtation. But this, we’d always tolerated, because he sold decent fish.

  Or he had, once. Mary Lucille examined the fish in its case and turned to look at each of us—it was not what she remembered.

  Frances agreed. Missing were the grouper and the rockfish she had loved.

  “The tilapia looks too orange,” Therese said. There was yellowing shrimp, dull haddock gone bloody, and flounder that had grayed.

  I didn’t know how to convince them that nothing had changed; this was the same fish we’d bought before. Maybe they had always liked fish more than me, or maybe their memories had glorified the conditions and colors of Burhop’s seafood: they remembered salmon so tender it fell from the bone. Glassy filets, scallops like jewels. Low prices, thick cuts.

  “Burhop,” Frances said, desperate, confused. “The fish is not the same.”

  Burhop only shrugged. “Same fish, Sisters. Same Burhop.”

  For Mother Roberta, we wanted blue crab. She liked blue crab best. But the only crab Therese found was shelled and shredded, glopped with mayo, stuffed in tiny tubs.

  Therese wanted to know if it was fresh crab meat.

  He cocked his face.

  “Define fresh.”

  Caught and brought by one of his Maryland men that morning, like it used to be, Therese told him.

  “From the ocean?” he said. He laughed then, his neck wrenched back. “That’s what a lot of people want,” he said, arms crossed, brows high. “People who don’t know fish.”

  Mary Lucille asked what he meant, and he said, “Look, Sisters. Sisters. I’m an honest man. I run an honest store.”

  He said it like we ought to come to our senses, like we ought to stop wasting his time.

  “But where’s this fish from, Burhop?”

  “The sea.”

  “Which sea, Burhop?”

  We waited. He was smiling, red in the face. “Look. I don’t know which sea, Sisters. China, probably. Russia. I don’t know. I don’t ask questions. Do you ask your potato chip man about the farm the potatoes came from? The fish comes in on a truck, and I display it here in the store, and you buy it and take it home and fry it up in a pan.”

  We looked back at the wet meat, arranged in sloppy rows. I felt sad at how different it seemed to them, and then sad that it didn’t seem different to me.

  We went out the door without goodbye, without any lackluster crab. Outside I was relieved to breathe air that was without taste.

  71.

  We drove to the spot where the old convent had been, just to see what it’d become. We were all a bit jittery with excitement, our energy erring on the side of manic. Frances sang a sped-up version of “How Great Thou Art,” the words all smashed together, making us laugh.

  The convent had been turned into business suites. There was a nail salon in our kitchen and a Pilates studio where our bedroom had been. Out back, they’d paved over the grass that used to be our yard. We idled near the exit and watched a woman in slacks walk across the lot. She noticed us looking and called to us, not unkindly. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

  Therese shook her head, and raised a hand to wave, and then we pulled away.

  * * *

  The church was empty, save for a man cleaning the windows on a ladder. We went to find Father Thaddeus in the rectory. We recognized him by his posture: his hips had always jutted forward when he stood. He was busy dragging a paintbrush across a wide stretch of butcher paper. From the side, he looked the same: grayer around the temples, maybe. The skin of his neck more loose.

  Therese said, “Father, hello. It’s nice to see you.”

  He did not lower the brush. We watched him shape a J and a U in green paint.

  Frances said, “We’re so glad to be back in Lackawanna.”

  Father Thaddeus did not turn to acknowledge us.

  Frances said, “Is Mother Roberta around?”

  He did not say anything else until he had finished, of his JUBILEE, the rightmost E, and we waited, watching him make his crooked letters.

  And then he bent to set his brush in the paint tray. He still hadn’t forced his eyes to meet ours. We watched him turn to wash his hands at the sink. He said, “Mother Roberta is busy in preparation. For the jubilee.” He paused and turned off the faucet, then jerked around to look at us for the first time, his eyes blank. “This weekend is Mother Roberta’s Golden Jubilee, you know.”

  Mary Lucille said, “We know about the jubilee, Father. That’s why we’re here.”

  He licked a finger and dabbed at dripping blue. “Oh, bananas. Now I’ve gone and smeared it.”

  Frances said, “Fa-ther.”

  “Yes?” Touching up the corner of the L with a dish rag. He stepped back to consider his work—HAPPY JUBILEE—then reclaimed the brush and started on an R.

  I’d never liked being near Father Thaddeus. He wasn’t outwardly cruel, or power-mad, like some priests could be. But he set my nerves on end. Maybe it was his bad table manners, or the fact that he’d never cared much about getting to know us, back when we lived in Lackawanna. Or maybe it was that he sweated too much. I could never pinpoint what it was.

  Therese said, “There’s really no way for us to see Mother Roberta before the Mass?”

  He said,
“Yes. I’m sorry about that.” But he said it as if it gave him pleasure.

  72.

  Later the four of us huddled before the motel vending machine. We wanted the cheese-flavored crisps: the ones from the top row of the vending machine. We paid for the cheese-flavored crisps, and we pressed A3 for the cheese-flavored crisps, but the cheese-flavored crisps got stuck in the coil and the bag of cheese-flavored crisps wouldn’t budge, despite our kicks and punches and shoulder shoves. The bag hovered there in the space between snacks and glass. The machine sucked up another dollar, and we chose the adjacent bag of crisps—garlic and herb—with the hope that as the bag fell, it might knock free the cheese-flavored crisps. But the cheese-flavored crisps only shuddered.

  In our room at the Super 8, we ate the pungent garlic crisps and played a single round of euchre sitting cross-legged on the pastel bedspreads. Therese and Frances won, but they didn’t cheer or high-five. They didn’t look happy at all.

  Frances called 411 and wrote down the address of Mother Roberta’s new home. Then the four of us went about our rituals, like we did every other night: cold cream on our cheeks and petroleum jelly on our knuckles.

  We prayed the rosary twice. The words came like moans, like hurt. The day had wrenched us; I felt tired in my scalp. My fingers were unsteady in their progressions, bead to bead.

  And then we switched off the light and lay to stare at the broad ceiling. Outside, the rush of the highway, which I pretended was the ocean when I closed my eyes.

  “My pillow smells like an ashtray,” Mary Lucille whispered.

  “So turn it over,” Frances said. But we all knew that wouldn’t change a thing.

  73.

  In the morning, Therese gasped to find she had stepped on a carpet-deep pin.

  The blood rushed out; she cried and yelped. Therese pressed hard on the wound, but the blood kept coming. I found myself woozy at the sight of her blood, so I waited in a chair until she had at last managed to slow the surge and bandage the wound.

  Down the steps, Therese could only limp, her foot heavy with pain. But she insisted on walking without help. This could serve as a reminder, she said. She could have stepped on worse.

  On the balcony she stopped the maid. The girl was folding towels, listening to headphones. She had a face too young for makeup, but her eyes were ringed with black ink.

  Therese spoke, her voice thick with rage: “You ought to vacuum with more attention!”

  The girl seemed only then to notice us. Lifted a headphone. “Yes?” Her helpful, expectant face, the practiced smile.

  Therese pointed a finger in the woman’s face and took a breath to speak. I looked at the girl: her tiny body aside the heavy cart, the mountain of towels for folding. Hers wasn’t the right ear for Therese’s rage. She hadn’t planted the pin, hadn’t taken the cheese-flavored crisps, hadn’t swapped the fish at the market. None of this was her fault.

  Frances said, “You’re doing lovely work with the towels. God bless,” and took Therese by the elbow. Therese panted with frustration as we walked to the car.

  * * *

  The walls of the retirement home were not the color of mayonnaise. They were wallpapered. In the entryway, big, floppy flowers the size of my head.

  “Is every room wallpapered?” I asked the receptionist. “In the whole house?”

  Her face made no mystery of how strange she found this question. “Yes,” she said.

  She told us Mother Roberta was napping. “The medication she’s on for her arthritis,” she said, “makes her very sleepy.”

  We hadn’t known she’d started taking medication.

  “Have her hands gotten much worse?” Therese asked.

  “Worse than what?”

  “Than before.”

  “Well, they’re better now that she’s taking medication.” The woman sounded irritated. She uncapped a marker and asked us our names, so she could make us name tags.

  “Oh, no need,” Mary Lucille said. “Mother Roberta knows our names.”

  She peeled away the cellophane backs.

  “All guests have to wear them,” she said. “How long have you known Mother Roberta?”

  Forever, I said. Forever.

  74.

  Mass was celebrated in the basilica: our old, magnificent church with the vaulted hall and deep domed apse. Everything was as grandiose as I remembered it. It occurred to me that I had missed, while we were away, the basilica’s exquisite ceiling, painted with illustrations of the sacred mysteries: scenes set on a background of blue, rendered with such precision I could identify the whites of the Virgin Mary’s eyes. It was a wonder, the kind of art that makes you feel as if you’re hovering above the earth.

  Therese claimed us a pew up front in the nave. The church had ordered baskets of daisies to put everywhere, and Father Thaddeus had hung his sign on the front of the altar. It appeared he had run out of space while painting: HAPPY JUBILEE MOTHER ROBERTA, it said, the letters of her name all crammed together.

  The place was buzzing: more packed than we had ever seen it. I scanned the rows; the crowd was thick with families I recognized and many I didn’t, from the parish and the school and the town. The church echoed with chatter. Upset babies, ill-mannered kids fussing in button-up shirts.

  When the organ struck up, I turned and leaned out to peer down the aisle at the procession: Father Thaddeus came first in a robe of white. Then a child struggling to bear the great oak crucifix, as tall as he. Next the deacon didn’t proceed so much as saunter, his face jolly and upturned, as if all these people had come for him.

  And then came Mother Roberta. Mother Roberta, solemn and serene. But she wasn’t upright. Mother Roberta was being wheeled. We looked at each other, then back at her. She was a fraction of the Mother Roberta we remembered. Her hands were gnarled and bent, her cheeks hollow, her hair more air than anything else. She was tiny and kinked up. It looked like every heartbeat brought her pain. We’d been gone ten months, and she’d become half herself.

  Still we summoned our joy and waved and smiled as she passed, but Mother Roberta did not look up. She kept her eyes forward, focused on the altar.

  The aide wheeling her, some pale young thing with loving eyes—she walked with good posture and a little bit too much confidence, her smile a bit too bright. She seemed perfectly competent, as if she’d been right about everything her whole life, but of course she’d never love Mother Roberta as much as I did.

  75.

  After Mass the basilica parking lot was thrumming with life. We could barely make our way to the food table.

  A feast had been assembled and abandoned in the sun. The rolled-up meats on the deli tray had become slick and limp, and the sliced cheese shone with oil. Browning fruits, chopped and mixed; deviled eggs, the devil melted thin; cans of pop floating belly-up in iceless water. I recognized the tray Father Thaddeus bought for occasions like this: vegetables sliced into neat rectangles, arranged around a tub of thick white dip.

  I snapped open a Coke. “Warm,” I reported. I slopped bits of everything onto my plate, then went to sit with the others on the steps of the parish.

  I looked out: Mother Roberta, low in her chair, was surrounded by parishioners on the lawn. The God-fearers, the blessed, the repentant, toting their babies and dogs. They came and shook her hand, smiled and laughed.

  It’s such a blessing that I perceive only a small fraction of the world’s noise. For instance, though I could, from the bottom step, see the fishmonger walking from his van in chino shorts, bearing a tub of gloppy crab, I could not hear him sing out, “Sister Roberta! Talk to me.” I could not hear him speak to her as if she were a girl.

  And I could see the kind way that Father Thaddeus brought Mother Roberta bottled water, and I could see that she thanked him by holding his hands in hers, but I could not hear the specific words she chose, the words that, if tender, might make me ache with envy.

  After a while, the four of us rose to make our way through the crowd to Mother
Roberta. I was struck, standing before her, by how collapsible she seemed. Her soupy eyes on us.

  Mary Lucille said, “Mother Roberta, so nice to see you. Congratulations. Fifty years! Wow.”

  She raised a knobby finger to point at Mary Lucille’s chest: right in front of her name tag. “Your name’s got three Ls, not two,” she said.

  Yes, the receptionist had spelled it wrong: L-U-C-I-L-E. But then I looked too long at her pointing hand—the gnarled knuckles, fingers askew.

  She saw me looking and extended her wrist, as if showing off a bracelet. She said only, “It’s rheumatoid.” The year before, her arthritis had been only a nuisance, something she could treat when symptoms arose. A fistful of Motrin, an ice pack every evening. But now the inflammation had won a landslide victory over her bones.

  “It looks painful,” I said, and when she said nothing, I went on. “Mother Roberta, it’s so good to see you. I’ve missed you.”

  “Sisters,” she said, to no one in particular. “I’d like some food.”

  To the novice standing behind her, Therese said, “We’ll take her from here.” The girl looked sullen, but she did not protest.

  Mother Roberta only wanted vegetables from Father Thaddeus’s Wegmans tray.

  Frances moved carrots and celery onto Roberta’s plate, then pushed a spoon through the dip and let it fall heavy on the plate.

  After Mother Roberta swallowed, she said, “Oh, it’s good to see you four. How have you been?”

  “Been” is an ugly word for an ugly thing: the past. Days, whole strings and stretches of them, gone, with little to be proud of. Mother Roberta wanted to know how our lives were, now that we’d left the parish, but I didn’t know how to sum it all up: how teaching was where I spent all my favorite hours, how I wasn’t sure we were making happy people of the Neons.

  When none of us volunteered anything, she spoke again. “Rhode Island’s got that new windmill farm,” she said. “And that river. That disgusting river.”