Agatha of Little Neon Read online

I also learned Rhode Island was where, earlier that year, a gay boy was dragged into the woods by his ankles and stabbed seven times in the neck. He was two weeks shy of sixteen. A birder found him belly-up in the pine needles, his throat split all over.

  “They need you all the more, then,” Mother Roberta said, when I told her. I wasn’t sure who she meant by “they”: gay people, or the ones who hated them. I didn’t ask. I was afraid to know the answer, but now I think it was probably both.

  * * *

  I don’t remember whom we prayed for that night. I don’t remember which rosary we prayed—the sorrowful, maybe, or was it the glorious? But I do remember this: It was nice. It was easy. There was joy in being on my knees with the others, our spines straight, jaws lifting and dropping in unison. We were in the front pew of the basilica, strings of crystal rosary beads in our hands, and we moved our thumbs and forefingers in time along the beads. We did not rush, did not mutter, did not once open our eyes. And it wouldn’t matter if we had, because there was nothing for us to see that we hadn’t seen. We knew every inch of the church, had learned each mahogany pew and marble column and pane of candy-colored glass. That church! That nave! We had spent so many moments with our heads jerked back, learning the ceiling by heart: all those luminous painted scenes of heaven. Within the dome, a flock of seraphim carries Mary to God, while the twelve apostles look on from earth. We’d memorized the details, the exact color of the clouds, the eagle next to John, the palm tree behind Luke.

  There was nothing new for us in that basilica, only things that had always been there, and though we could not admit it to each other, that’s what we wanted, too: to always be there, in the place we’d become sisters. Remain, remain, remain.

  5.

  The Vatican elected a new pope our last month in Lackawanna. That day, we were all on our period. Mary Lucille’s came first, in the night, a round blot on her sheets. The rest of us were bleeding by midmorning.

  We should have been studied. As novitiates, we’d been shy, then giddy, when we found at the washing machine that all our full-cut briefs were stiff with blood on the same day. Ovarian synchrony! It was like a little miracle. It was like falling in love.

  Mary Lucille announced that we’d run out of the thick pads we liked. For the thick pads, we had to drive to the bulk store four miles away. To drive to the bulk store, we needed keys to the van. For keys to the van, we had to go to Father Thaddeus in the rectory.

  He was in the den, watching the news. On the screen, smoke plumed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. The newscaster said, “It’s hard to say whether this is white smoke or black—I gotta tell you, Doug, it looks gray to me.”

  When we’d listened to the radio during breakfast, there’d been black smoke, which meant no consensus, but now there was smoke of an indeterminate color, which meant no consensus about the consensus. We wanted it to be white smoke, which would mean there was an answer. An end. We were tired of hearing Father Thaddeus talk about it. At meals he spoke with his mouth full, repeated himself, talked over us, explained things we already knew. He was obsessed, deeply invested. Therese suspected he’d put money on the outcome, but Frances didn’t think so. She thought he suffered from dissociation. Frances liked to name other people’s problems.

  We stood in the doorway and Frances said hello, but Father Thaddeus didn’t seem to register us. He was bent over, elbows on knees, as if he were watching an overtime quarter of football. He muttered, “Oh, for the love of Mike. How about that.”

  At forty-two, Father Thaddeus was exactly half the age of the deceased pastor, Father Doug. Fat Father Doug had had a massive heart attack one morning during a baptism. A baby in one hand, he clutched his chest with the other. The baby’s wails were still echoing in the basilica when the paramedics lifted Father Doug into an ambulance. When we buried him, we knew that we would miss his generous laughter and his Sunday French toast, but we were surprised by how much we longed to hear him hum in the other room.

  Father Thaddeus did not hum. He shrugged. He sighed and muttered and groaned. He ate sliced roast beef and fistfuls of spicy snack mix. His patience was cursory at best. In Mass, his homilies were brief and conversational, and he sped through Communion, doling out wafers in rapid succession—“BodyofChristBodyofChristBodyofChrist.”

  But for the papal conclave, he seemed to have endless patience. He nodded when the newscaster said, “The whole world is waiting to be told the color of this smoke.”

  Frances cleared her throat. “Father, we’d like to use the car.”

  He did not turn from the screen. “What for.”

  “An errand,” Frances said.

  “What kind,” he said.

  To us, Frances rolled her eyes. To him: “It’s personal. Lady stuff.”

  There was a pause. He was still staring at the smoke. “Key’s on the hook,” he said.

  We were already out the door by the time he called, “Wait.” We turned. He said, “Be back by dinner.”

  6.

  Behind the wheel, Therese was agog, late to brake and quick to go. She took every yellow light and a number of reds. Frances sat shotgun, one hand tight on the over-door handle. In the back, Mary Lucille ate graham crackers for carsickness, and I pressed my forehead to the glass.

  Everything was colored with the fact of our leaving, and the trip to the bulk store seemed then a valedictory drive through Lackawanna, a passing farewell to the junkyards full of car parts and the driveways of people whose daughters lay out, legs bare and gleaming. We passed the halal butcher and the non-halal butcher and the Dairy Queen.

  Lackawanna. The town was built on iron ore by iron-willed people, and we’d survived nine ruthless winters there, hidden away in our little clapboard house.

  “Hard to believe the next time we menstruate, we’ll be in Rhode Island,” Mary Lucille said, and sighed.

  * * *

  Outside the Lackawanna bulk store, there was a miniature steel horse that, for a dime, would swing you forward and back. Also, the entirety of a man’s genitalia graffitied on brick.

  Inside, we found a pyramid of cereal boxes. A love song playing overhead. Frilly greens, slick with mist. Melon, balled and chilled. Cellophane-wrapped roses and daisies dyed blue.

  We put the maxi pads in our basket, and when we saw nylons were on special, we sprung for those, too. They came folded inside paper cubes, showcased under little plastic windows.

  After we paid, a boy carried our bag to our car, even though the pads and the nylons together weighed less than a loaf of bread. It was his job, he said. They’d had too many people stealing carts, or walking off with the potted begonias from the display out front. “Not that you would do that,” the boy said.

  “Oh, I’m not so sure,” Therese said. “We have a bad reputation.” The boy didn’t see she was kidding, because he must not have known sisters could kid.

  On the way home we were quiet. Frances turned on the radio, then switched it off just as quick. When Therese merged onto the thruway, we rolled the windows down, and the wind was so wild we could not speak.

  A few miles out, just before our turn, the car issued a pained squeal; then, a snap. “I can’t steer!” Therese cried, and we looked: the steering wheel was stuck, unyielding. “I can’t steer!” she cried again, and started to brake. In the back Mary Lucille grabbed my hand, and we watched Frances fling herself over to help Therese force the wheel to the right. On the shoulder, Therese threw the gearshift into park and turned off the ignition, her chest heaving. For a moment, the four of us neither spoke nor moved.

  Then Therese reached below the steering wheel and released the hood latch. We watched her step out to go stare at the engine’s innards. And then, all at once, the three of us unbuckled and climbed out to join her.

  With her bare hands, Therese checked the coolant and the transmission fluid. She’d tried, in the past, to teach us the parts of the engine: the alternator, the fuse box, the radiator, the spark plugs. But I retained nothing. When I lo
oked at the engine, all I saw was places for trouble to hide.

  Mary Lucille walked circles around the vehicle while Frances read aloud from the manual. Therese wriggled her way under the car and then wriggled her way free.

  “I’m stumped,” she said.

  In the glove compartment there was a slim rectangular phone. Therese wiped her hands on her skirt and flipped it open, and it took a minute to hum to life.

  She left a message. “Hi, Father, it’s me, Therese. It’s Friday evening, just about five p.m. Uh, so, we might be late for dinner. We’re on Route Sixty-Two, mile marker eighty-two, and—do you know what it means when the steering wheel won’t turn? Because ours won’t turn. I can’t figure it out. Okay, so, if you get this, call us back. The number’s on the fridge.”

  Each time a car whipped past us, the van shook hard.

  Therese called again, and when Father Thaddeus still didn’t answer, she hung up. Mary Lucille said, “Maybe we should pray.”

  Therese gave her a look, then tossed the phone onto the front seat and went back to sink her arms into the depths of the engine.

  If you look long enough, there is always something to blame.

  Therese found the trouble: the serpentine belt—the black strap that moves the water pump—had snapped right in half. She pulled it free, a squirming length of rubber, and dangled it in the air for us to see. “Look,” she said. She tucked it in a cup holder. With a bit of glue, she said, it would seal the gap under the convent’s front door.

  It was our belief that everything could become something else. Mother Roberta had showed us how to make bar soap from lye, how to keep out ants with cayenne pepper. We cleaned under our nails with the corners of offertory envelopes. There’s always a way to give something new life, but most people don’t realize this. Most people don’t want to know all the lives contained within disposable things.

  “Now what?” Frances said.

  “The nylons,” I said. Everyone turned to look at me. “We could—well. Tie them.”

  A silence.

  “And make a loop,” Therese supplied. “Genius.”

  There was some debate as to whether we ought to use the old nylons we were wearing or the ones we’d just bought, which might be more durable, since they had no holes and windows. But we decided it was a shame to dirty brand-new ones, so we reached up our skirts and hopped on one foot, then the other, to kick our nylons free.

  We watched Therese tie the feet to the waists and make a loop, and when she leaned into the engine to guide the nylons over the engine’s pulleys, I bent to watch that, too. There was slack, so she tied the loop tighter. Her fingers caught grease and her forehead went slick with sweat and I held my breath. Therese told Frances to climb inside the driver’s seat, and she gave her a signal, and the engine turned over and we watched the pulleys spin, and the nylon moved the disparate parts at a speed I could only guess at, and when Frances moved the steering wheel, the tires moved, too. We whooped. We hollered. We laughed. Amid the thick fields, along the broad paved road, we had found a way to move.

  * * *

  While we were threading hosiery through the car engine, Father Thaddeus called to say he was coming to save us. The voicemail was panicked, as if it were he who was in trouble.

  Frances tried to call him again to say we didn’t need help, but he didn’t pick up.

  We could have made it all the way home that way, we were sure, nylons holding the car together. But many times, the greatest mercy you can grant a man is the chance to believe himself the hero. This was obedience, we thought.

  And so Frances snapped the phone shut and Therese slipped the loop of nylons from the pulleys. She slackened the knots, and we wordlessly tried to distinguish them. Frances and I were the same size, and our pairs had the same reinforced toes, but hers were tawnier. Therese was tallest, and spindliest, and needed the longest, palest pair. Mary Lucille needed the widest waist and shortest legs.

  When she’d hiked hers up, Therese bent to put the serpentine belt where she’d found it, and then she slammed the hood shut.

  Back in the van, we folded our dirty hands and waited for Father to arrive. We sang low hymns and watched the grass take the wind. We waited. We whistled. We counted the cars that passed.

  The parish florist gave Father Thaddeus a ride to mile marker 82. We could see, from where we were parked on the roadside, the pale faces of the men in the purple van, perched among the florist’s bouquets. Lilies pressed up against the windows, ranunculi in the passenger seat, and the waxen face of our parish pastor above his white collar.

  “Oh dear,” Father said, when he stepped out of the van. “What did you do?”

  We popped the hood and let him look. Father shoved his shirtsleeves high, frowned into the depths, and we stood behind him, arms crossed. He muttered to himself; we did not say a word. Even though we could point to the problem, knew what the van needed, we stood and let the wind upset our veils, and we waited while he stared at the valves and hot pistons, allowing him the time he needed to conclude whatever he would.

  7.

  Maybe it was lily-livered, the way I watched it all happen, never dared object to the way things were.

  Over the next few weeks, the convent sold our every armchair, every last fork and knife. From the kitchen window I watched people walk off with all our stuff. One man gave Mother Roberta seventy-five cents for the Ping-Pong table, and then, when the table was too big for his truck, he asked for his quarters back. We gave away crates full of beat-up toys and picture books. All three space heaters, the davenport, the window blinds, the bottle of bleach—every day, more things left. And then, one morning in the middle of May, the time came for us to leave, too.

  It was still dark when we said goodbye to Mother Roberta on the driveway. She was in her nightgown and slippers, and her hair stuck straight up on one side. She handed each of us a Slim Jim and an apple and a bar of lavender soap.

  Mary Lucille was crying. Then we all were.

  “Pick seats in the middle of the bus,” Mother Roberta said. “It’s safest in the middle. Everyone always thinks the front is safest, but if you’re in the front when there’s a head-on collision—” She made a low whistle. “And wear your seat belts. And be kind to the driver.” Then she hugged us, there on the driveway in the early morning dark.

  When it was my turn to be hugged, I didn’t know how to let go of Mother Roberta. After a moment she kissed my cheek and pulled away.

  “Get going,” she said.

  So we left for the bus depot, walking single file down the driveway and along the side of the road. We’d packed light: sheets, nightgowns, underwear, sunscreen. As we went, our duffel bags thudded against our legs.

  A few days later, Mother Roberta would leave, too. Father Thaddeus drove her to the home for elderly sisters in Batavia, where everyone lived on the first floor and she wouldn’t have to wash the dishes. I wondered if she’d have preferred to live out her days where she’d always lived them, in Lackawanna. One of our last nights together, I asked her if she was sad to leave. “God is calling me there,” she said, just like God was calling us to Woonsocket. But the way she said it, it sounded like “Quit whining.” It sounded like “Grow up.” She’d been eating Hershey’s Kisses, and I watched her crush the foils in her fist.

  It was impossible for me to tell just from looking, as we walked to the bus depot, whether the others were, like me, afraid to leave, or if they were so somber with a sense of obligation that they never let themselves feel dread. Perhaps they were determined to love whatever awaited us and expected nothing else. I watched them walk ahead, their heads bent low, habits fluttering, and couldn’t make up my mind how they felt.

  How wonderful it would be, to wring yourself of questions.

  At the bottom of the hill, I turned back to look at our little house. Mother Roberta had gone inside the garage, and it looked like she was waving to us, but then the garage door shut. She’d been reaching for the handle.

&nbs
p; 8.

  Woonsocket: a tuckered-out town in northern Rhode Island, split down the middle by a river of waste. The sidewalks were littered with condoms and crushed empties. From Woonsocket you could vomit into Massachusetts; from Massachusetts, kids came to buy liquor and fentanyl after nine.

  No bus would take us straight to Woonsocket; instead, we spent the morning on one Greyhound, that night on a second Greyhound, and the next morning on a third, our legs kinked up in the stiff-backed seats the whole way.

  Woonsocket, Rhode Island: on the bus we repeated the syllables until they became discrete and strange. Rode Eye Land. Road Aye Lend. Roe Dial End.

  We sat four across in the middle of the bus and whispered the rosary in the morning and at night, moving at fifty-five miles an hour. I want to think that no one on that bus looked sidelong at us as they passed down the narrow aisle, that it wasn’t fear or contempt that made people avert their eyes and hold their children close as they walked past us. But I know better. Four sisters in heavy habits, muttering Glory Bes, who slept with their mouths open and ate beef jerky straight from the plastic. We were the opposite of invisible, but still difficult for people to see. When people saw our habits, they ceased to see our faces.

  As a girl, as soon as I knew what prayer was for, I prayed for likeness. “Dear God,” I said, every night. “Make me unexceptional.” When hairdressers or dental hygienists called me pretty, or told me they liked my curly hair and my cola-colored eyes, it was clear I was supposed to be flattered. But flattery wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be overlooked. To recede. The highest praise anyone could give me was that I looked just like another girl they knew, that they could have sworn we were twins.

  And for a while, with my ordinary ponytail and the right blue jeans, I went unnoticed. I had no glasses or braces or birthmarks or special talents. Teachers sometimes forgot who I was and called me by some other girl’s name. I loved this. I wanted to be indistinguishable.