Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  “Okay. We’ll start with little steps,” he said. His voice was firm, no-nonsense. “Stand up and walk with your heels together, toes pointed out.” He watched me do it. “Now, add a little glide,” he said. “Push off with one foot, glide with the other.” I tried. “Now, squat. Get a little closer to the ground. Not that low. Okay. Right, push off and glide, push off and glide, push off and—whoops! Okay, get back up.”

  For a second I stayed on the ground, belly-up, laughing and moaning at the same time. I’d skinned an elbow, and blood came through a fresh hole in my nightgown sleeve. Tim Gary gave me a hand back up.

  When I got the push-and-glide part down, Tim Gary taught me how to stop: you drag a toe. Then he told me about turning: you cross the opposite leg up and over, and you push and lean and glide where you want to go.

  I was sweating, smiling, ready to practice as many turns as I could make in the two-car garage. But then Tim Gary pulled the garage door up and said next I had to make my way to the end of the driveway and back.

  I looked out past the hood of the white van: beyond it was nothing but night.

  “Come on,” he said. “Be the first Neon to break curfew.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’ll fall and die. Or the abbess will kill me.”

  “No one has to find out.”

  I’m still not sure what scared me more as I stood and looked into the dark with little wheels on my feet: staying there, or not staying there. But the night looked lovely and wild and immense, and so I lunged headlong onto the driveway before I could talk myself out of it. The only sound was the skate wheels spinning on the blacktop and thwacking over the cracks and then I was there, on the street, and I dragged my right toe to stop. When I turned around Little Neon looked blue in the night, and I could see that Tim Gary was grinning, radiant under the bare bulb that hung in the garage. He called to me in a whisper that was also a shout. “You did it! You did it!”

  * * *

  Later, upstairs, the others were snoring at different speeds. No one roused when I lifted my sheets and slipped into bed.

  19.

  Pete liked to mail a page of the newspaper or a Xeroxed poem to his friend Manny, whom he’d met in Central Falls, in prison.

  Manny still had three years left of his sentence and didn’t have anyone on the outside but Pete. Days off from the granite yard, Pete took the bus to visit Manny, or he’d go to the greyhound track and watch dogs race, and, twice a month, he got a ride to a facility in Cranston, where he’d sit with his nine-year-old daughter and color with Magic Markers while a supervisor watched. To Cranston he wore a shirt that buttoned and pants he’d ironed, and each week he came downstairs with all three of his neckties and asked which we thought he ought to wear. One Sunday, he allotted extra time so he could bring his daughter a Happy Meal, but by the time he arrived, the fries were cold and limp.

  Prison’s where Pete started reading poetry. In Little Neon he always had a book of poems with him, and he was fastidious about returning them to the library on time and always came home with another. He recited whole stanzas from memory, often without provocation. He was in a big Anne Sexton phase. I think I liked the recitations more than the others did. “Thank you,” Therese said, every time he finished a poem, but it sounded as if she was only glad he’d reached the end.

  * * *

  Pete sent Manny some Sexton or a page from the sports section or sometimes world news. I asked Pete if it wouldn’t be better to send a whole section of the newspaper, so Manny could finish articles that were spread out over multiple pages, but he said he didn’t have the stamps for that.

  I told Father Steve we needed money for stamps. Before we’d left Lackawanna, Mother Roberta had advised us to write to the new pope—introduce ourselves, tell him we’d be praying for him, and ask that he pray for us in our new vocation in Rhode Island.

  “Sending mail to the Vatican is expensive,” I told Father Steve.

  He let us buy five hundred-stamp rolls. When I showed Pete, he said, “Now Manny will know how everything ends.”

  * * *

  One morning I looked through the paper before Pete had woken up. There was an article in the metro section about church leaders in California, who’d written many checks of many thousands to keep many people quiet. I pulled the page from the paper and tore it into shreds over the trash can. I told myself I was protecting Pete, and Manny, too, but really I was protecting the church.

  When we first heard rumors like these, Mother Roberta told us to listen, and to read the Bible, and to pray. We listened, and we read the Bible, and we prayed. When there were new articles with new names, we prayed some more. No matter how much we prayed, there were always new names. I asked Mother Roberta if we were praying hard enough. “I’m sure you are,” she said. “Don’t give up.”

  20.

  We spent half an hour writing letters to the pope on sheets of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. It seemed to me we should use better paper with a bit of weight, or at least paper that wasn’t yellow. But Frances said, with undue authority, “The pope doesn’t care what kind of paper we use.”

  I didn’t see why it was so easy for everyone else to come up with things to write. They were flying, as if it were an exam and they had prepared in advance and were now afraid of running out of time. They grabbed and filled second and third sheets of paper while I was still trying to finish my first. And then I felt even worse when it was decided we ought to read ours aloud to each other. It was as if I’d responded to the wrong prompt. I’d written about the things that I hoped the pope would address, and the others had written the stories of their lives.

  Therese told the pope how she’d been in awe of the nuns she’d known growing up, especially her high school track coach, Sister Geraldine, who taught her to pray before and after the starting gun, keep her knees up and her hands loose. Therese ran faster and longer when she asked for God’s intervention. She won medals and championships, and college coaches called her at her parents’ house to promise her glory, scholarships, free sneakers, all the yellow Gatorade she could drink. But when it came time to take the SAT, Therese skipped the test and donated the fifteen-dollar testing fee to the convent. Sister Geraldine told her God had great things in store for her.

  Mary Lucille’s letter read like a confession. She detailed how she’d left an old boyfriend to pursue religious life. For the pope, she avoided going into detail about this phase of her life, but we all remembered how she used to talk of Hank. She had lived with him, she told us, and she claimed they’d loved each other, but there was a pink crater on her neck where Hank had put out a cigarette, and a bald section of her scalp where she’d pulled out all her hair in those first months, when he would call the convent every day and ask to speak to her. Early on, she used to talk to us about how much she missed Hank, and some nights when we were novices I could hear her weep in the dark, but the closer we got to taking our vows, the less she mentioned him, and we were careful to never ask. She told the pope that she’d been blind, all those years; God was the real love of her life all along.

  Frances wrote about how she’d known since she was a girl that she owed her life to God. As a girl she was a Bible fanatic; she could not get enough. She went on every mission trip, silent retreat, and pilgrimage she could find. She daydreamed of parables and built dioramas displaying the lives of the saints. Her mother was horrified when she decided to become a sister, but it was only because she didn’t understand. The moments Frances felt most useful and alive, she told the pope, had always been the moments she spent with her hands folded in prayer.

  And I? I asked the pope to consider the poor. I told him, in not so vexed a tone, that he needed to choose whom he’d serve: the people, or the priests. After the others were reading what they’d written, I told them I hadn’t finished mine yet; it wasn’t ready.

  “Oh, come on,” Therese said. “Who cares. Just read what you have.”

  I shook my head.

  “Agatha,” Fra
nces said. “We all read our letters. It’s only fair.”

  Mary Lucille said, “She doesn’t have to read it if she doesn’t want to. You’re not the boss.” But then Therese lunged across the table and tried to pry the letter from my hands. My face hot, I pulled it free and tore it into pieces while she watched.

  “What’s the big deal?” Therese said, and when I didn’t say anything, she crossed her arms. “Well. I guess you’ll have to start over, then.”

  I did eventually write a new letter, but I still didn’t write about myself. I wrote about pews. I told the pope that I noticed very few people sit up close to the altar. Most churchgoers liked to stay near the back, near the exit, as if they wanted to keep a safe distance from the pulpit, or they thought they’d need a quick escape to the world outside. But the exception was my sisters and me. We always sat in the first pew. We always got as close as we were told we could.

  21.

  Mary Lucille and I sat near the kitchen window and watched Therese on the driveway. It was the middle of the afternoon, and she was up on a ladder, taking a scissors to the old rope net on the basketball hoop. I could hear her muttering to herself each time she worked the scissors: “Take that! And that!” When it was free, she chucked it to the ground.

  She was sweating through her habit, stopping every few minutes to mop her brow. She’d just lifted the new net to thread the loops onto the rim when Tim Gary came into the kitchen. He looked through a drawer a moment, then said, “Have you seen the scissors?” He wanted to cut his hair.

  Mary Lucille said Therese had them outside. She said, “You should let Agatha do it. She cuts all our hair.”

  It was true: twice a year, whenever we changed the clocks, I lopped inches from my sisters’ hair. I was limited in my technique—Therese got a blond bob, Frances a shorter brown bob. Mary Lucille wore her hair cropped close, with a curtain-like look. Her hair was thick and the color of dust. The three of them trusted me. I felt close to them those afternoons, memorizing their cowlicks and ears.

  I told Tim Gary I’d be glad to, and he said okay. “I do have a hard time reaching the back.”

  He wet his hair under the kitchen sink and dragged a folding chair to the backyard. Therese was finished with the scissors, which were enormous, more like hedge trimmers than hair-cutting shears. I stood behind him and took some hair in my fingers. Up close, I could see the scars on his face: they looked like puckered seams.

  Therese was practicing layups, flouncing in her habit, and Mary Lucille sat near the blacktop and gave her feedback. After she sank a shot, Mary Lucille said, “Bingo!”

  Tim Gary closed his eyes. “I like it short on the sides,” he said. “And I part it on the left.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  After a minute, he said, “I used to think if I grew my hair long maybe it would create an optical illusion, and make it look like I still had a whole jaw. But it just looked like I needed a haircut.”

  I trimmed around his ears, and Therese missed a shot. “That’s okay, that’s okay,” Mary Lucille said. “Next time.”

  “You’re distracting me,” Therese said.

  “Okay, I’ll be quiet.”

  Therese sank the next shot.

  “Hot diggity dog!” Mary Lucille cried, and Therese shot her a look. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  I took a half inch off on the sides of Tim Gary’s head, then lifted the hair on top and closed the scissors along the edges of my fingers. When I finished cutting, I blew the bits of hair from his shoulders, and Tim Gary turned to look at himself in the kitchen window. “Hot diggity dog,” he said, “to borrow a phrase. It’s perfect. Thank you.” I smiled big. “Come on, Mary Lucille,” he said, waving her over. “Let’s see about fixing a bird feeder to this tree.”

  I felt my heart bulge. The other Neons avoided us sisters, like dogs dodging a vacuum. They exhibited little interest in getting to know us or letting us get to know them. Even Pete had little to say to me that wasn’t about stamps. They always had other places to be, other people to talk to. But Tim Gary was the exception. He didn’t mind finding himself in our company. He liked to have us around.

  22.

  Frances went to work designing promotional materials for the Bible study. She’d thought she’d stay busy gardening vegetables, but she planted one packet of radicchio seeds and then got bored. “Forget vegetables,” she said. “These people don’t need vegetables. What they need is sacred texts.”

  The meetings would start in September, once a week every Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., but she wanted to start spreading the word. She had Father Steve make an announcement at the end of each Mass. She put an ad in the missive. On the parish computer she designed a flyer. She’d used a free template, and it came with a picture of a spotted dog in the middle.

  “Why is there a dog?” Therese asked, looking at a copy in the kitchen. I was at the table, reading the geometry textbook.

  “I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it,” Frances said. “The template was a flyer for a lost pet.”

  “It’s cute,” Mary Lucille said. “Let’s keep it.”

  “But a dog has nothing to do with the Bible,” Therese said.

  “Maybe I can include a disclaimer that there’s not actually a dog involved,” Frances said, but then Therese told her it wasn’t hard to delete the dog. The next flyer Frances printed out had no dog, but to make up for the space, she’d made the word STUDY larger than all the other words. And she’d included a picture of a Communion wafer next to a glass of Eucharistic wine.

  “It looks a little scary,” Therese said. “Like we’re yelling. And why is there wine? People will think we’ll be serving booze.”

  Frances told Therese if she was so smart, she could design the flyer herself, and Therese came back with something tasteful and simple, with tear-off information slips on the bottom. “It’s perfect,” Mary Lucille said, and Frances looked but didn’t say a word.

  It was a relief not to have to talk to anyone about my work. We’d had a conversation about all this: the three of them would take over organizing the Bible study while I taught math. “You can still come, of course,” Frances said. “You just don’t have to do anything.”

  They discussed their plans for Bible study all the time. They wanted to welcome anyone, from any religious background, as long as they were at least fifteen. Their plan was to start from Genesis and go all the way to the very last book, Revelation.

  “How long will that take?” I asked.

  They looked at each other. Frances shrugged and said, “As long as it takes.”

  * * *

  There was more reading involved in geometry than I remembered. Each theorem was a long, complex sentence, and you had to know what all the words meant in order to try to understand it.

  After morning prayer, I studied at the kitchen table. I studied while I waited for my turn in the shower. I studied when I was supposed to be asleep. I solved every problem in the back of the book, found the area of each circle and trapezoid. I learned words for the way the world was built: “perpendicular” and “parallel” and “congruent.”

  But it didn’t feel like enough. To know something is one kind of work, and to turn it into speech is another kind entirely. I was good at memorization. But how would I say it all out loud?

  I became so overcome with anxiety that one night I took Mary Lucille aside in the attic. She was the one whose compassion was most easily tapped.

  “You already know more than they do,” Mary Lucille told me, though I could tell she, too, only half believed it.

  It took all my courage to articulate how I was feeling. “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Aw, Agatha,” she cooed, and cocked her head. “Just do what Mother Roberta would do. Don’t speak until you know the right words.”

  In the dark, I stared at the ceiling and wondered what it felt like, to know the right words.

  23.

  It was the rule: in order to get a free donut, you had to go to church.
You couldn’t wait at home until Mass ended and duck into donut time, or ask someone to bring you one. There were no shortcuts.

  Pete and Tim Gary had no trouble finding something of value in Mass; Pete, in particular, was a sucker for psalms. But Baby, Horse, and Lawnmower Jill couldn’t stand Mass. For them, it was drudgery. It was cruel and unusual punishment. Baby thought it wasn’t worth the donut, and Horse and Lawnmower Jill agreed, but the church had air-conditioning, and that was enough to draw them from their beds in the summer.

  One Sunday in late July, Mary Lucille volunteered to work the crying room, and Lawnmower Jill decided to go with her. She thought it’d be less boring than sitting in the nave. She was wearing her purple parka and cutoff jean shorts.

  “Won’t you be hot?” Therese said.

  “No,” Lawnmower Jill said. “I use it like a purse.” By way of demonstration, she slipped a banana into a pocket.

  “You might have to change a diaper,” Mary Lucille warned her. “Or clean spit-up. Or calm a baby down. Or have your hair yanked. You have to be ready for anything. You never know what’s going to happen in the crying room.”

  Lawnmower Jill said, “Bring it on.”

  * * *

  It is a pleasant thing, to be read to, even when you aren’t really listening. Father Steve’s homily was about many things: adolescence, Iran-Contra, a man who purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of Healthy Choice pudding, taxes, white flight, something called a skipjack, and Adam and Eve. The AC was cranked high, and huge industrial fans were blasting so loud, his voice got lost on its way from the pulpit.

  Horse was nodding off. I gave her a nudge, and she blinked and sat upright. Father Steve liked to strum a guitar while he sang hymns—he hated the organ, called it “stodgy,” felt it had no place in modern worship—and each song was like a lullaby.