Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  I was eleven when my mother died. I missed four days of school, and when I returned, it seemed that I had, through no deed of my own, given everyone a reason to know my name. For many months, kids looked at me sidelong in the classroom. If they spoke to me, it was with both pity and dread. My homework, too, was looked at differently: spelling errors went uncounted, miscalculations uncorrected.

  I was marked by grief. There was nowhere for me to disappear, except in the back of the church each week, when I’d sit alone and fold my hands and say the prayers I knew. The words were always in the same order, unchanged from when my mother was alive.

  When I was young, I didn’t speak; I recited. I pledged allegiance. I hailed Mary, full of grace. In the bath, I sang songs I’d heard on commercial breaks: songs about carpet cleaners, mint gum, Coca-Cola, cat food. My dolls spoke to each other about medication side effects and furniture closeout sales.

  * * *

  My mother had sent me to a school for kids who had trouble doing what other children could do with ease. I had an impediment, they said, and they assigned me an aide. No one could understand why I hated talking, why it was so much work to come up with something to say. It was even more work to make it true or funny or smart. And then when you’d come up with it, you had to say it, and live with having said it.

  But after my mother died, I found things to say in church. On Sundays I could be anonymous. I found a little constancy: the familiar rhythm of the hour, the stories with endings I knew. I didn’t have to come up with a way to be all right—I could just stand in line and wait for a priest to place Communion in my palm. Church explained nothing of my life, but church pulled me forward. I crossed myself and said amen and made my way down the aisle.

  9.

  The world outside the bus window disappeared. If I looked, I would have seen the shape of my face in the glass. The sturdy chin, my mother’s straight nose. I might have been able, if I leaned close, to count the freckles on my cheeks, or point to the scar where I’d slipped on the diving board when I was seven. But I did not see any of this, because I did not like to look.

  * * *

  My mother had been dead eight years when I started selling scratch-off tickets and gallons of gasoline at a gas station outside of Buffalo. All the girls I’d known in high school were becoming nurses or wives, and I’d wanted to become neither. I worked the night shift. One heavy man came each evening to take home the same prepared foods: a roast beef sandwich on a kimmelweck roll, wrapped in white paper; loose grapes in a cup; two slices of cheesecake in separate plastic containers, varnished with bright cherries in syrup. Each night I asked the man if he needed a fork for the cheesecake, and each night he said he did. Even though I knew what his answer would be, I kept asking. I hoped he’d someday decide to reuse the fork from the day before, and I waited every night to see if he’d change.

  My brother was twelve and learning algebra; I was nineteen and learning how to look people in the eye. I was learning other things, too: how to distinguish packs of cigarettes by color, the names of the blacks and yellows and reds. I was memorizing the refrain of every pop song on the radio. But mostly I was learning that the only way for the night to end is for the night to end. There was no way to speed up a lonely hour.

  There must have been nights, back then, when I did not feel lonely or afraid, when I did not come home to my father’s house and cry in the dark. But these are not the nights that I remember. Instead, there’s just this: whole evenings spent with my elbows on the counter, staring out the wide window of the convenience store. I was looking into the cars parked at the pump; I was looking for other people. I wanted to see who stayed in the passenger seat while the driver filled the pump. Women, mostly. They looked at their faces in the overhead mirrors, or they smoked out the window, or they turned to calm a baby in the backseat.

  In the morning I would go home and sit in the glow of my father’s television, reruns set to mute, certain that there was nothing more wonderful than to know someone was sitting somewhere, waiting for you.

  Sometimes people came into the store and sometimes they did not, and one night when the bell chimed I looked up to see a woman in a habit.

  I’d known only one nun as a kid, the elderly woman who taught sixth-grade history. She was tetchy and quick to yell, and I thought that all nuns in existence were the same: unpleasant, mad at the world. When I was young, my mother took me to Mass, and on the drive home she made fun of the nuns. She said they had emotional problems and buck teeth, and she’d stick out her teeth in the rearview mirror, and I would laugh and laugh.

  But this woman was different, many years younger and smiling. Buoyant: she looked buoyant. And this was unusual, because no one in South Buffalo looked buoyant. Everyone looked as if they’d already sunk.

  The nun came for cough drops, which she paid for with quarters and dimes. I studied her face as she dropped the coins in my hand—it brought me calm.

  “Cough?” I said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You have a cough?”

  She said no, but one of her sisters did. She was on her way home from the county prison, over in Alden, and thought she’d stop.

  “That’s a long drive,” I said.

  She said she didn’t mind it. “And we take turns driving. There’s a few of us who go, serve communion.” She tucked the cough drops in her purse.

  She lingered near the sunglasses, displayed on a rotating tower near the rows of bagged nuts. I watched her spin the tower and select a pair of aviators, then bend to consider her face in the janky mirror. She wasn’t satisfied, so she reached for others—I watched her try the chunky oversized ovals and the cat eyes and the wraparounds and the heart-shaped ones. And it was while she was looking at the world through the heart-shaped ones that another nun came into the gas station. “Well, if it isn’t Lolita,” the other nun said, and they both cracked up.

  Later, I would learn how to tell this story. I would revise my own memory. I would describe, for those who asked, a version of the evening that involves my sudden understanding of the will of God. I have learned that people like to hear about callings. Vocations are half magic, half luck, reserved for the chosen few. But the truth is that I do not remember a call, not the way it happens in Scripture: sudden, unexpected, unmistakable. A vision, maybe, or the distinctive voice of God. An angel appearing in a dream.

  I do believe there are women who hear their names and wake with a start, but not me. There was no invitation. There was only that night in the gas station: it was late, and I was lonely, and I understood, watching the two nuns, that you could live your whole life alone if you weren’t careful. You might never find a decent place to hide from yourself.

  “What about these?” the first nun said, when she’d slipped on another pair of frames.

  Her friend considered. “No, no. Here, try these.” And she handed her a different pair.

  10.

  Somewhere outside of Albany, a woman with a young baby boarded the bus and chose a seat in front of Mary Lucille and me. She was around our age, this woman, and her child sounded displeased to be on a bus—not wailing yet, but about to. Mary Lucille leaned forward to say hi to the baby, her voice gooey and warm like it always was when she spoke to something small. “Hello, sweet girl,” she said. “How old?” she asked the mother.

  “Seventeen months last Tuesday,” the woman said.

  “Let me know if you’d like me to hold her for a while,” she told the mother. “If you need a minute. A little break.”

  “Oh, wow, yeah,” the mother said. “Please. Go ahead.” And she handed the baby to Mary Lucille with obvious relief. “Her name’s Judy.”

  “Judy!” Mary Lucille cooed. The baby went quiet, eyes wide. “You’ve got the cutest little cheeks! Yes you do!” She turned to show me the baby’s face. “Agatha, doesn’t she have the cutest little cheeks?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and turned to the window. Babies made me nervous. In Lackawanna, when there were
still babies at the day care, I did what I could to avoid them. Frances and Mary Lucille and Therese were expert caregivers, competitive with their compassion. The three of them vied for the babies’ love.

  But it was Mary Lucille whom the little ones seemed to like best. Watching her lift a baby to her chest, you’d see something turn soft and loose inside her. She loved to burp them. She loved to feed them, soothe them, wipe them, change them. Frances and Therese sometimes lost their patience, tucking spoons past their little lips again and again. But Mary Lucille was calm. She’d smile and lift a towel and keep going.

  I preferred to watch. The mothers liked to know what went on during the day, so I walked around with a clipboard and kept track of crying jags and naps and diaper changes. Once Therese tried to show me how to change a diaper. You lay the baby belly-up on the table and unsnap its pants. Then you strip the diaper free, grab the ankles to lift, and work a wipe front to back. Therese made me use one hand to spread open a new diaper and the other to tape it shut, and then she showed me how to fold up the old one so nothing came loose. She was fast. She was thorough. I wasn’t very good. I stuck to my clipboard after that.

  Mother Roberta used to tell us what it was like when the day care first opened. In those days, Mother Roberta told us, religious orders were either changing too quickly or not changing quickly enough. There’d been talk, before Vatican II, that maybe the pope would decide to let women into the priesthood. He didn’t. But he did allow sisters to engage more with the world. Uncloister themselves. Mother Roberta told us while women in other orders boarded buses to work with the poor, the Lackawanna order was slower to make progress. Everyone debated whether they’d wear long habits or short habits or no habits at all. They settled on long habits, and then they elected to open the day care. It was something, Mother Roberta said, but she’d have rather had holy orders.

  On the bus, the baby fell asleep in Mary Lucille’s arms, and in the seat ahead of us, the mother fell asleep, too.

  11.

  On the last leg of the trip, we passed a wind farm. A dozen towering turbines stuck in the ground on either side of the highway, gathering the power of the gales. “Look,” I said, and the others glanced. The turbines stood lean and spare and silent. Stoic: that’s what they were. Wind energy, I knew, was something good, but I hadn’t pictured it so elegant. I liked that if I focused on the revolution of one blade, the operation appeared slower than if I considered all the blades together.

  The final hour of the trip was unbearable. There was roadwork outside of Worcester, and the traffic was so bad it felt as if we moved one inch at a time. When we finally arrived in Providence, Abbess Paracleta was waiting in the parking lot, arms crossed as if we should have been sorry, should have done something to prevent the traffic.

  There was so much of her. She was as tall as the cab of her flatbed truck, with jowls and square shoulders, and she wore the same black habit we did, but hers was thick wool, no blend. She hadn’t quite rubbed in all the sunscreen she’d applied to her cheeks and forehead and nose, as if she’d been in a rush.

  We said hello. We thanked her for coming. We presented her with a deck of playing cards we’d bought at a rest stop. On the back of each card was a full-color picture of Niagara Falls.

  “What for,” she said.

  “For fun,” Frances said.

  In the truck Therese sat shotgun, her long legs up against the glove compartment. Frances and Mary Lucille took the back jump seats, and I sat on top of Mary Lucille. Her breath was sour and hot. We did not speak. Abbess Paracleta rushed the engine and charged onto the thruway, soaring past slower cars. Each bump made Mary Lucille wince under my weight. I watched the odometer needle drop to the right. The abbess drove in silence; she said nothing about the route or the weather or the roads. On the phone the week before, she had sounded excited about our arrival, but she now seemed stripped of enthusiasm, as if she had, upon seeing us in person, perceived and could not forgive our ineptitude.

  We sped on to Woonsocket. Abbess Paracleta had described it, over the phone, as the sneeze between Boston and Providence. “There’ll be so much wind you’ll think the world will run out.”

  She had spent the past couple of weeks keeping watch over the five people who had come to live in Little Neon. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again,” she said now. “And getting back to my liturgical work. It’s such a relief that you’re here.”

  I watched the abbess reach for her handbag on the floor. Her foot heavy on the gas, she held the wheel with her knees and rummaged in her bag until she’d found what she wanted: a letter envelope. And from the envelope, I watched her remove translucent slices of pink ham, wet and limp.

  She offered us some.

  I shook my head.

  “No, thank you,” Frances said.

  Therese said, “I’m all set, thanks.”

  Mary Lucille said, “Yes please,” and the abbess dangled a slice for her to take. Mary Lucille folded the whole thing into her mouth. Therese made a face.

  “I didn’t have time to pack a real lunch,” Abbess Paracleta said. “But I love ham. People don’t realize that most meats will travel well,” she said. “You can slip cured ham in an envelope, toss it in your handbag, and you’ll find it later”—here she tore a slice and stuffed one half, then the other, into her mouth—“when you’re crying in a phone booth, or when you’re alone in the unlit stairwell of a damp parking garage.” She swallowed, licked a thumb. “And you will rejoice.”

  Mary Lucille nodded, and I nodded, too. I could tell it meant something to the abbess, the ability to calm herself down. It’s a skill I envied. I’d never learned, not for all the times I’d been alone and afraid, all the nights I’d worked the Sunoco counter, all the times a stranger paralyzed me with a lecherous look. Prayer could only protect a woman from so much.

  Abbess Paracleta ate with one hand and steered with the other, and I counted the miles that passed. The land outside my window was the continuous kind of ground: sweeping sameness with no intervals, no ways of marking difference.

  12.

  Little Neon was the color of Mountain Dew. Abbess Paracleta told us later she’d bought the paint on clearance. You could see it from three streets away: a bright yellow-green narrow colonial smack dab in the middle of a sea of beige and gray colonials. White shutters, white door, black driveway, a white van parked in front of the bright green garage. It was like looking at the sun. All I could see, even when I blinked, was Little Neon green. It looked chemical, lurid and lovely at the same time.

  “Are we here?” Mary Lucille said, when the abbess parked in the driveway.

  “Duh,” Frances said.

  * * *

  Tim Gary was the first person we met in Little Neon, the only one home when we arrived. I was careful not to stare. Before you’re face-to-face with a man, you imagine he’ll have all the bones that you do, more or less. But Tim Gary had only half a mandible. His face was lopsided: the right side dropped off just below the cheekbone, the skin puckered and shapeless and loose. When he spoke, the words came out muffled and flat. He was skinny, fragile-looking, with thin hair that was carefully parted and combed. His eyes were kind, the lashes long.

  We unpacked our duffel bags in the attic of the home. The abbess had lined up four cots in a cramped row. I took the one by the window. That attic! It was never meant to be lived in. The door we couldn’t lock, the floorboards that swelled and shrank, the vaulted ceiling so low we had to stoop. Even now, I am transported there by the strangest things: a splinter; the smell of mothballs or medicated shampoo.

  Tim Gary started to tell us how parts of his jaw were taken away. “You’re probably wondering what happened to my face,” he said.

  Abbess Paracleta stabbed a broom at the corners of the attic and coughed at the dust. She said, “The sisters are tired from their trip, Tim Gary. Maybe you save the story.”

  But Tim Gary did not save the story. The others kep
t stuffing pillows into cases; I turned and looked at him as he spoke. He started and did not once stop. I watched him push out the words with evident effort. Like me, I thought, but jawless.

  Two winters ago, he told us, he had a cancerous section of jaw removed, then another, then another. Then part of his tongue. If you were rich, he said, doctors could rebuild your jaw with a piece of bone from your leg. But he wasn’t rich.

  He had hurt; he had hungered. After the surgery, he was fed through a tube. And then his lips were numb for weeks after they pulled the tube out, so he subsisted on liquids. Green ice pops were better than orange; chicken broth was too salty and made him bloat.

  That’s when the trouble with pills started, he said. He learned to like Dilaudid more than he liked any living person or liquid meal. Now he was back to eating solid foods, and he’d given up pills, but his meals had to be soft and easy and slow. He brushed his teeth with a toothbrush made for a kid.

  “And now all the cancer’s gone, but so’s five inches of my jawbone,” he said.

  Tim Gary had found good work as a fry cook. He had half a nursing degree and an ex-wife in Delaware, and maybe one day, he told us, he’d go back for both. He had no wife, or girlfriend, or lover, but Tim Gary had his habits. And, he told us, he wouldn’t be changing them. Not for us, not for anyone. He worked late and woke late. He drank fat Pepsi and orange juice with calcium. He liked to pray but didn’t like to be told what to pray for.

  Abbess Paracleta dragged a finger through the grime on the window glass. “There’s a chore wheel,” she told us. “But you’re going to have to remind them.”

  “Oh, we love to clean,” Therese said, though this was only true of the three of them. I was the untidy one, the one who left dishes in the sink, who’d rather swallow a mop than push it across the floor.