Agatha of Little Neon Page 9

  “And I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and she took one look at our habits and said, ‘I’m an atheist,’ instead of hello,” Frances said. “And I said, ‘That’s fine; we just had a question,’ and she said, ‘I don’t have time,’ and I tried to ask again, but she said, ‘Leave me alone!’”

  “She was so rude,” Mary Lucille said. “Whose turn is it?”

  “Yours,” Therese said.

  As soon as Mary Lucille started in on the bread basket, the man’s large red nose lit up and buzzed. “Anyway, Agatha, we found the bathroom, and then we set off for the parking lot.” She passed the tweezers to Therese.

  It was then that I started to feel I’d missed out on something. This was the first day they’d spent without me in years, and I’d been so absorbed in what was in front of me that I’d forgotten about the places I could have been instead. It seemed I’d forfeited something valuable, irreproducible.

  As Mary Lucille talked, I could see it all so clearly, it was almost as if I’d been there. In my mind, there we were: we walked in stops and starts, until the trees thinned out and the buildings fell away, and we arrived at a great, wide parking lot with an array of cars parked one after another. The rows stretched on forever, and the blacktop sparkled in spots where old water met spilled motor oil. At each car, we pressed our bellies to the hoods and reached to lift the wipers, and every blade, in its rise and fall, made the same two sounds: a squeal, then a slap.

  I could hear that squeal. I could hear that slap.

  “By the time we were done, our habits were so dirty,” Frances said, “we had to shake them out like mad.”

  I wanted to have seen that filth fly.

  “Aha!” Therese said: the funny bone.

  “Then what,” I said.

  “Well, we saw this man walk across the lot to his car. And we watched to see if he would notice the flyer. And he did. But he balled it up and tossed it to the ground,” Frances said.

  “Didn’t even read it,” Mary Lucille added.

  “He’s just one person, though,” Therese said. “Probably a lot of people appreciated the flyers. Probably they think it’s a great idea. Frances, your turn.”

  Frances tried for the bread basket but couldn’t get it out. “Then we walked home,” she said. “We split a Fudgsicle from the Tedeschi.”

  “Nice,” I said, and tried to strip the hurt from my voice. I felt not needed.

  Mary Lucille removed the bread basket successfully, but Therese still won.

  “Want to play, Agatha?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, “I’d rather just watch.”

  34.

  Not long after I started teaching, Baby bought a trumpet from the pawn. A way to deal with stress, he said. He used to play in high school, he said, before he dropped out, and back then he’d sold his horn for drug money. He’d hoped to buy it back but never did, and the horn he did bring home wasn’t as nice. But he was thrilled anyway. He started to practice most days he didn’t have to work, in the hours before dinner.

  He never played whole songs. He played long chords, arpeggios, scales, and sequences, and in between he would rest, and I would think maybe it was over, and when he started up again, I jumped in my seat. I couldn’t concentrate, so I went to the public library to grade and prepare for class whenever Baby had his trumpet out.

  The quiet study room was available by request only, and one day the sleepy-eyed librarian told me that a man had claimed it for the rest of the month. When I walked past, I saw he had a bunch of books about becoming a paramedic, but he hadn’t opened them. He was playing some sort of handheld video game.

  I sat at a table near the computers and tried to read about symmetry. But I hadn’t read very far when I heard someone’s wacky laughter coming from the stacks.

  I knew that laugh. I closed my book and went to see, and sure enough, there was Horse, sitting on the ground in the space between two bookshelves, delighted by how easy it was to rip pages from a book. She tore one free and crumpled it, stuck it in her jeans pocket and grinned, lost in private rapture.

  I could tell she was seeing things I couldn’t. Her blood had something it wasn’t supposed to have. She was all liquid and lassitude.

  “Horse,” I whispered. “What are you doing?”

  She stopped smiling and looked my way, but her eyes seemed to bore straight through me. “Nothing,” she muttered. She tore another page, then another, with rote efficiency, but in slow motion.

  “Come on, Horse,” I said. “Let’s go home.” I reached for the book, but she hugged it to her chest.

  “You can bring the book,” I said. I stretched out a hand to help her up, but she shook her head, and then she kept shaking it. Her face rumpled. She looked desperate.

  My sisters would have thought of something else. They would have made her get on her feet so they could see if she was in any condition to walk. Or they would have made her stand in a cold shower. They wouldn’t have been so quick to let her do as she pleased. But all I could think to do was to sit on the floor and wait for Horse to excise all the insides of a book. After a while, she stopped seeing the fun in it. She told me she was ready to go home.

  * * *

  Horse didn’t fight when Therese asked her to pee. She’d passed last Monday’s drug test, but when I brought her home from the library, pale and listless, Therese took one look at her and sent her to the toilet with a tamper-free cup. Horse nodded, resigned, and the others and I stood in the kitchen to wait. Pete was in the kitchen, too, working a sudoku.

  “Pete, why don’t you give us a minute,” Therese said.

  “I’m almost done. Just pretend I’m not here.”

  “Go on. You can take the paper with you,” Therese said.

  He stalked off. Upstairs, Baby was blaring long notes that seemed to last forever.

  “Shouldn’t we watch her,” Mary Lucille said, when Horse had shut the bathroom door, “to make sure it’s her own pee she’s putting in the cup?”

  No, Therese said. Horse couldn’t have cheated if she tried: it was hard enough for her to unscrew the top from the cup, much less do any of the things Abbess Paracleta had told us a Neon might—they might substitute someone else’s pee for their own, or substitute synthetic pee for real pee, or add eye drops or Drano or dish soap. So each Monday Therese checked their pockets before they took their test, and she listened at the door and stuck a thermometer in each cup and, without a flinch, leaned close to smell each specimen before she dropped in the test strip.

  * * *

  Horse put the hot cup on the counter, and Therese told her to go take a nap. Horse said she wasn’t tired, and Therese said she hadn’t asked if she was tired. Horse tried to make sense of this, as if it was a riddle, and then Therese told her to leave.

  When Horse was gone, they made me tell the story three times.

  “What book was it?” Mary Lucille asked.

  I shrugged. “Not sure.”

  “Do you remember the aisle? The Dewey decimal numbers?”

  “What does it matter,” Therese said.

  “I’m just wondering,” Mary Lucille mumbled.

  Therese held the test cup to the light and watched the lines appear.

  * * *

  Therese called Abbess Paracleta. When the abbess showed up, Horse was at the kitchen table, playing solitaire. The abbess asked Therese if she could look at the test results. She glanced for only a second, and then she took a seat across from Horse, hands folded. “Horse,” she said, but Horse didn’t look up. She was trying to find a place for the eight of spades.

  “Horse,” the abbess said, firmer this time. “Do you know you failed a drug test?”

  Horse nodded.

  “Does the clinic know you failed a drug test?” Treatment at the methadone clinic was contingent on the patient’s sobriety. “Your sponsor?”

  Horse gave up on the eight of spades and picked up the jack of diamonds.

  “I can call them for you, if you like,” t
he abbess said. “Or we can go over there and talk to them together.” Horse said nothing. “And you should think of where you will stay tonight.”

  What I liked about the abbess was that she never told anyone what they should have done. She wasn’t interested in blighting anyone with shame. She dealt in procedures and plans.

  There was nowhere for Horse to put the jack of diamonds, but she turned over an ace and placed it up top. The abbess said, “Horse.”

  Finally, Horse looked up and nodded. She looked exhausted, undone. “Okay,” she said, and gently pushed all the cards into a pile and patted them into place.

  * * *

  She moved into an apartment in Morin Heights, in one of the Section 8 units. Pete told us she kept showing up at the granite yard for work. She was on time and did her job, as always. The two of them installed a countertop for a woman in Cranston, who had a television the size of a sofa and a sofa the size of a sailboat. And Pete said Horse did fine with the epoxy and lining up the piece right. He said she seemed happy enough: even though her new landlord was a “dick,” she liked Morin Heights. She had her own microwave. The water pressure in the shower was better. She could smoke inside.

  But then one day she didn’t come to work.

  There were rumors going around, Pete said: that she’d relapsed and been kicked out of her unit in Morin Heights, or she’d relapsed and died from choking on her puke, or she’d relapsed and was sleeping on people’s front porches and fleeing before they woke up. Or she’d relapsed, overdosed, died, came back to life, and married another junkie in Atlantic City.

  “Where’d you hear these rumors?” Frances asked Pete, and Pete said he never revealed his sources.

  We’d lost our two women. Now Little Neon was three men and us four religious. We were supposed to choose new housemates: the abbess brought us stacks of housing applications from people who were up for parole and others who were looking to stay sober and some who were up for parole and looking to stay sober. Therese liked to flip through the stacks of paper and read the short essays. But I didn’t like to look at them. They made me uneasy. There were so many applications, and just the two spots in Little Neon.

  “Can I have the back bedroom?” Baby asked, when Horse left, and we told him okay, but only until the arrival of whoever came next.

  35.

  The girls I taught were bored and prone to naps. These concepts didn’t move them—vertices and polygons and formulas. The means of calculating the surface area of a sphere would likely never overlap with the things they wanted to know about the world. They wanted to be experts in everything—cello, pinch pots, the significance of astrological signs, the hundred-meter dash, string bracelets, the periodic table, the right way to parallel park, mitosis, meiosis, French verbs in the plus-que-parfait—everything, everything, everything, except geometry.

  I was sympathetic to this. I didn’t tell them I retained nothing of high school geometry besides my teacher saying, “You’re on the plane.” Looking over my lesson plans, I had no real defense of geometry, except that it seemed to be our means of knowing the shape of things, and assessing our place in the world relative to everything else.

  * * *

  That September I told the girls everything I’d read about lines. The textbook had a whole chapter about them. A line is the connection between two points. Or three or four or however many points you want. A line lacks “curvature.” It’s supposed to go on forever in both directions, and it is supposed to be straight.

  But here is something I know now, something I did not have the words for back then: straight is a myth. Any seemingly curveless length of graphite or ink will, upon closer inspection, reveal itself to be uneven. Think of any line from your childhood, I should have told the girls: the thick red stripe on the gymnasium floor, the skinny blue lines on a sheet of loose-leaf. Draw a line between the events of your life. Look at any of these up close, and you’ll see what I mean. On earth, a line is just a bunch of bumps. There’s no such thing as straight.

  * * *

  At night I’d lie in bed and review my lesson plans with a flashlight while the others slept. Once, I was so overwhelmed with anxiety that I shook Mary Lucille awake. “I am not meant to be a teacher,” I said. “I don’t think it’s in God’s plan for me!”

  She blinked. Her face shifted and I could see that, for the first time since we’d been sisters together, she had run out of patience. “Go back to sleep,” she said, as if it were easy, as if it were something anyone could do.

  36.

  If nonbelievers read the Bible, they would love the Bible, and if they loved the Bible, they would believe in God, and if they believed in God, they would pray to God, and if they prayed to God, whatever was broken and nasty inside them would turn tender and nice. This is what my sisters believed.

  I wasn’t sure it was so easy. Some people might need a little coaxing, I thought, or a little proof. But I couldn’t find a way to tell them this.

  At some point Frances had assumed the role of Bible study director. No one asked her to, but no one objected, either. At least, as far as I knew. I’d been more mindful lately of what I couldn’t know of their time together. Sometimes it seemed our days took place in separate time zones, with their own weather. I had an idea in my head that the three of them saw a different noon than I did. But I didn’t like the way this sounded: like self-pity, or jealousy. I put it away.

  Frances was right for the job: she was punctual and organized and confident and did not dwell long on how she was perceived. These were her advantages in the world. I either envied her or shrank from her, depending on the day.

  She compiled an agenda: introduction, prayer, lecture, read-aloud, discussion, closing prayer.

  “Shouldn’t we include a break? For snacks?” Mary Lucille asked.

  Frances looked up from her legal pad. “All’s we have the budget for is popcorn. Maybe discount chips.”

  “Everyone likes popcorn,” Mary Lucille said. “Right?”

  Frances didn’t say anything, so Mary Lucille looked to me. I nodded. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “People are crazy for popcorn.”

  * * *

  Bible study was held in Little Neon’s living room. Frances shut the curtains and switched on the overhead lights. Guests sat on the tattered rug, the tweed recliner, the corduroy couch, the green footstool. The footstool had one short leg, so whoever sat there spent the hour lurching.

  It was mandatory for the Neons to attend Bible study, which was good, because otherwise hardly anyone would come. The first meeting, only two non-Neon people showed up, a pair of twin teenage girls I couldn’t tell apart. They had been dropped off by someone in a silver car. Their mother, they told us, was making them attend. They both appeared to have crushes on Baby the instant they saw him: the swoopy hair, the hooded eyes. One cupped her hand over the other’s ear and whispered something that made them both glance at him and giggle.

  Frances had overestimated everything: she’d asked Father Steve to order three dozen used Bibles from his supplier in Boston. She asked for the ones in best condition, and a few copies were blank, never read, their spines uncreased. But most were pretty beat up. Some pages were yellowed out with highlighter, or full of doodles and notes. It was hard to say which Bibles made me sadder: the ones that had never been opened, or the ones that had once been loved and then given up.

  Frances told Mary Lucille to pop cups and cups of corn. We had enough popcorn to fill a bathtub. It was a little burnt.

  When the three of them decided to get started, Frances flicked the overhead lights on and off, like a grade school teacher hoping for quiet, even though no one was talking.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” she said, beaming. “Welcome. Let’s start by going around and introducing ourselves. Tell everyone your name, your favorite animal, and why you’ve decided to study the Bible. Okay?” She waited for everyone to nod, but only the three of us did. “I’ll start. My name’s Sister Frances, my favorite animal is a zebra, and, u
h, I decided to study the Bible because it’s the best book in the world.” She looked around the room. “Baby, you want to go next?”

  Baby was kind and decent, but he was obligated to be bored all the time. “I’m Baby,” he said, his voice flat. He was slumped low in his chair. “What else am I supposed to say?”

  The twins cracked up.

  Therese crossed her arms. “Your favorite animal, and your reason for studying the Bible.”

  “I like snakes, I guess,” he said. “And I’m studying the Bible because it’s required.”

  “I’m Tim Gary, and my favorite animal is a dolphin.” He was sitting up straight, eyes bright. “And I’m studying the Bible because it’s got a lot to tell us.”

  “I’m Mary Lucille. I love cats. And I am always trying to get to know God better.”

  I looked around the room. Pete brought a single piece of popcorn to his mouth, and Baby picked a hangnail, and one of the twins stared at a spot on the wall, then blew a bubble with her own spit. Only Tim Gary seemed to listen. When I said, “I think … giraffe,” he nodded, as if I’d made a good choice.

  It took a while for everyone to talk about themselves. After, we said an Our Father, and then Therese gave a presentation about the Book of Genesis. She’d made copies of a handout: “The Patriarchal Age,” it read. It was a list of the men who show up in the first five books of the Bible, with notes on each. She went through the whole list. “Noah,” she read. “Father to Shem, Ham, Japheth. Lived nine hundred fifty years, made the ark, survived the flood, invented wine.”