Sister Ava spends the first week teaching my mother the routines of each nun.
“Sister Louise doesn’t like her bed made too tight. Sister Desiree doesn’t like it too loose—she says it’s a sin to sleep in a bed with loose sheets,” Sister Ava explains as she sorts folded towels and feminine napkins on her cart.
While Sister Ava complains about another nun’s custom of leaving her wet towels on the floor, my mother looks around the small living quarters with wondrous possibility.
* * *
After her second weekend working under Sister Ava, the young nun asks my mother, “Do you have any questions?”
“Yes,” she hesitates, but continues, “why did you become a nun?”
“For Jesus,” the young nun says automatically. “And because I had nowhere else to go—I knew He would accept me.”
“But you’re beautiful,” my mother blurts. “I’m sorry,” she adds.
Sister Ava sits on a windowsill. The limbs of an oak tree reach toward the building. “I was engaged,” the young nun says. “My fiancé hit me. I have no family, so I came here.” Sister Ava stands and places a clean white towel on a towel rack. “Why are you here?” she asks my mother.
“I think I want to become a nun, like you. My family can’t pay for college.” She hands Sister Ava a roll of toilet paper.
Sister Ava looks at my mother and says, “If you’re going to come here, you should know for sure that it’s what you want.”
“It is,” my mother says.
* * *
Spring comes early. My mother rides a bus for the thirty-minute drive to the convent on Saturday mornings without a jacket. The nuns have taken a liking to having my mother around. She leads the rosary in the chapel the second Saturday of the month, accompanies the sisters to Saturday-evening and Sunday-morning masses, rides the convent bus to the hospital to administer communion to the dying, plays board games in the afternoon with the sisters, and continues her housekeeping duties with Sister Ava. By May she feels like a Sister of Mercy.
But my mother has a secret.
At the end of each housekeeping shift, Sister Ava takes the cart to the basement to clean the kitchen bathroom. On their first shift together, Sister Ava tells my mother, “I’ll finish from here. The basement bathroom is small—it’s a one-person job.”
With all activities at the convent running on a schedule, my mother discovers after the first week that she has fifteen minutes when she’s unaccounted for. From three forty-five until four o’clock, she is the only person on the second floor in the Sisters of Mercy living quarters. None of the bedroom doors are locked, and on her second week working with Sister Ava, my mother begins sneaking into Sister Agnes’s room—the closest room to the stairs—stripping to her underwear and putting on the nun’s spare habit.
She loves the way the polyester fabric feels against her bare skin. The reflection she sees in the mirror looks like the future. She kneels on the hardwood floor and prays one decade of the rosary that hangs over the headboard of Sister Agnes’s twin bed. Ten beads move through my mother’s fingers before she replaces the rosary, removes the habit and dresses in her own clothes.
Each week she becomes bolder. She sticks her habit-covered head out the window to get a better view of the lilac trees that are starting to bud and the lake below the hill. She is intoxicated with the smell of spring and the feeling of wearing the nun’s outfit.
Some Saturdays from three forty-five to four, she lies on Sister Agnes’s bed in the nun’s habit and thinks about the oncoming future. Or she thinks of nothing at all, simply lies there, content.
Two weeks before her high school graduation, while she lies in Sister Agnes’s bed trying to think of nothing at all, she is lulled to sleep by the gentle breeze from the open window and the sounds of cardinals singing in the oak trees.
All she recalls is closing her eyes before a hand grabs her shoulder and a voice yells, “What in the good Lord’s name are you doing?” My mother opens her eyes. Sister Agnes holds my mother’s crumpled clothes in her one good fist.
My mother leaps to her feet. Sister Ava stands in the doorway. My mother starts to cry, and she does not stop until both Sister Agnes and Sister Ava have left the room and shut the door.
She changes into her clothes and hangs Sister Agnes’s habit in the closet. She stares out the open window for a moment before she walks out into the hallway.
Sister Ava convinces Sister Agnes not to tell Mother Superior about my mother’s transgressions. “She is only a child,” the young nun says to the older Sister Agnes.
“She was naked in my room,” Sister Agnes says.
“What are you wearing under that habit?” Sister Ava asks.
Sister Agnes’s face turns crimson. She looks away from both Sister Ava and my mother then storms into her room and slams the door.
My mother is shaking. Sister Ava leads my mother to her room down the hall. Closing the door behind them, the young nun pulls a pack of cigarettes from under her mattress. She opens the window, lights the cigarette and blows the smoke out into the spring day. She holds the cigarette toward my mother. “It will help with the nerves,” she says.
My mother accepts the cigarette between her fingers and takes small puffs. It’s the first cigarette she’s ever smoked, and the habit will stick, lasting two decades as tumors grow in her stomach like black mold.
She doesn’t join the convent in the end. Sister Agnes agrees not to turn my mother in to Mother Superior, but in July, Mother Superior still tells my mother that she doesn’t believe a nun’s life is what God wants for her. My mother spends most of the rest of the summer in bed. She doesn’t go back to the convent though Mother Superior encourages her to stay on as a volunteer. She tries to pray, but she feels betrayed by God. Later she meets my father in a bowling alley and she begins to find happiness again.
* * *
This story is recounted often in my childhood, my mother telling it to my brother and me as a way to express that what God wanted from her was to have a family. We are her calling. Eventually she stopped blaming God for being turned away by the Sisters of Mercy, but she never stopped smoking, not until last winter when our house teemed with cats, quitting at the urging of my father and her doctors when they thought her stomach was only plagued by ulcers.
But now she’s smoking again. I wonder if she’s actually heard my father talking about his problems at work all summer when he thought she was deep in her chemo dreams. She only smokes when my father’s at work or at the hardware store. She takes small drags in the kitchen, blowing the milky white smoke from her cigarette out the back door to our porch. She can only take a few puffs before her violent cough begins. Though she hides it from my father, she smokes openly in front of my brother and me. We don’t know what to say about this disturbing habit. At D.A.R.E. class they told us smoking caused cancer.
“What if you already have cancer?” I ask my brother. We’re hiding in the grove of trees in our backyard, watching my mother through the screen door, smoking our own cigarettes from a pack my brother bought from an older kid in the neighborhood. I badgered him until he finally agreed to smoke one with me in the backyard as long as I would shut the fuck up. My mother paces back and forth in the empty spot in the kitchen where our table should be.
“I guess it doesn’t matter if you already have cancer,” he says.
I let out a drag from my cigarette. “Do you think she’s going to die?”
He shrugs.
My mother steps onto the porch with her lit cigarette and stares out at the grove of trees. “Dinner,” she yells.
We eat on the couch in the living room. My mother’s eyes droop as we watch television. The green ashtray sits on the end of the coffee table, two crushed cigarette butts perched on the glass lip. When the crunch of my father’s tires sound in the driveway, she takes the green ashtray to the kitchen, r
inses it in the sink and places it in the cupboard above the refrigerator. As my father unloads wood from his car, my mother says, “I need to go rest. Be good for your father—he has a lot on his mind.”
* * *
Taylor shows up on the Fourth of July.
Up and down the street there’s the pop of Roman candles, black cats, M-80s, Lady Fingers, poppers, snaps and snakes. Kids scream down the asphalt, their bare feet slapping the pavement, holding fistfuls of lit sparklers.
My father has sent us out of the house. He’s closed the windows and pulled the shades so my mother can sleep through what he calls the Redneck Olympics. He cringes each time the house echoes with the bang from an M-80 being lit off somewhere close by. I wonder if the stress of all that noise makes my mother crave a cigarette despite her sickness.
My brother and I don’t want to be in the house anyway. Not tonight. Cory Roberts’s older brother came back from basic training with a duffel bag of illegal fireworks he bought down south.
We pull our bikes out to the street to take stock of the night. My brother doesn’t ride off without me like I expect him to. His girlfriend is in Maine for the week, and he’s being kind to me.
“Where to?” he says.
“I don’t know, just ride around until dark?”
He nods and we start pedaling.
The sun is falling in the metal-blue sky. Every few moments there’s a crack above our heads. We look up to see a firework bloom for a brief moment before it fizzles. These explosions are just the beginning, the restless actions of boys and men loosened by domestic beer. The real show starts when it’s dark.
We pedal slowly, trying to see who’s setting up the most fireworks. From his front porch, Mr. Barton waves to us. We know Mr. Barton from church. He organized the car pools for the Planned Parenthood protests and came to all the prayer sessions for our mother. He’s joyless but kind.
“The cops won’t do anything when I call,” Mr. Barton yells to us, as if we’re on his side.
Across the street Travis Bouchard runs into the road with a string of Lady Fingers and lights them off. It sounds like someone has opened fire on the neighborhood. Mr. Barton is yelling something at us, but my brother and I take off. Tonight we’re not church boys. We’re just another couple kids from the neighborhood.
“Let’s go see what’s going on at Cory’s,” my brother says.
We stand up on our bikes to pump the pedals hard, heading to the corner lot where Cory lives.
We set our bikes down on the front lawn. Cory’s uncles drink beer and shout at each other. All of Cory’s family works at the gravel yard at the edge of town by our old trailer park and the Native burial ground. The sleeves have been ripped off his uncle’s T-shirts and their skin is burned red.
“Is Cory here?” my brother asks. None of the men turn to look at us.
Cory’s father comes out the front door. He’s the foreman at the gravel yard. His arms aren’t sunburned. His three brothers all live in our old trailer park, but he owns this house. Cory’s father looks at us standing dumbly on the front lawn. “They’re in the back,” he says. “Don’t get your hands blown off.”
We sprint around back and find Cory and his brother, Justin, talking over the plan for lighting off the fireworks. Justin is almost as tall as their father. Before he went to basic training he had a double chin and a gut. Now his jawline is narrow and his T-shirt sits flat against his waist. In a few weeks he’ll be deployed to the war in the desert where he’ll lose hearing in both ears during a roadway ambush.
There are other neighborhood kids hanging around examining their sorry collections of Roman candles and sparklers next to Justin’s war chest from the south.
My brother asks Cory for a beer.
“You don’t drink beer,” I say.
He gives me a look telling me that if I say another word he’s going to kick my ass.
Cory laughs. He’s a year older than my brother, already in high school.
“Here,” Justin says in a voice an octave deeper than it was last fall when he got on the bus for boot camp. He produces a beer can from a cooler at his feet. My brother takes the beer and snaps it open. White foam overflows from the top. He slurps at the can and doesn’t cringe when he tastes the bitter liquid.
“Can I have one?” I ask.
Justin looks at me and laughs. “Get the hell out of here,” my brother says.
As I walk away, I hear them laughing.
I find Shane Donaldson counting a small supply of Roman candles. I haven’t seen him since we both got caught in the junkyard. “You want to set one off right now?” he asks when he sees me. “I’m saving them for dark, but we can do a few if you want.”
I shake my head, and he goes back to arranging his fireworks. I sit in a lawn chair and try not to look out of place. I don’t want to talk to Shane. I don’t want to hear his prophesies of my mother’s death, especially now that she’s sneaking cigarettes again. I’d go home if I could, but my father won’t let me in. My mother’s in bed all the time now. They’re afraid the chemo isn’t working; she’s sicker now than she’s been since the cancer first took hold.
I wish I at least had a cigarette, though I doubt I’d have the balls to smoke it in the open even on a night like tonight when most adults are too drunk to notice or care what the kids are doing.
In the corner of the yard a girl in jean short overalls and a white T-shirt sits on a plastic chair. Her feet are tucked under her thighs. She’s not talking to anyone. She pushes a strand of dirty-blond hair behind her ears. Her hair’s cut short above her shoulders. Her nose comes down at a sharp angle and ends at a button point. Her cheekbones are high on her face. Her dark eyes scan the yard of boys playing with their fireworks. When her eyes land on me I look away and watch Shane work through his pathetic collection of Roman candles.
“You don’t have any fireworks?” a girl’s voice says.
I look up and the girl is perched above my chair. She stands with her weight balanced on her right hip. Her head is tilted as she stares down at me.
“Well?” she says. “Who are you?”
Shane stops counting his fireworks and stares up at the girl, considering her sudden presence in our neighborhood. I hope he doesn’t say anything weird to her.
I tell her my name.
“I’m Taylor,” she says. “My mom and her boyfriend bought the double-wide around the corner. I found a path that leads from our backyard to this neighborhood. That’s why I’m here. Why are you here?”
Taylor doesn’t look away from me as she talks. Usually I’m invisible in these situations.
“I live here,” I say. I have never spent this much time looking directly at a girl who was looking directly at me.
“You live here?” She points to Cory’s house.
“Down the street. I’m from the neighborhood,” I say.
Taylor sticks the tip of her tongue through her red lips, considering what I’ve told her. “Which house is yours?” she finally says.
Shane lights off a Roman candle next to us. A spark flashes in front of my eyes, and Taylor squats toward the ground as the firework blurs past us and over Cory and Justin’s house.
Taylor stands. “That almost hit me,” she says to Shane.
Shane looks down at his empty hands as if they can explain what happened. “I’m sorry,” he says.
She glares at Shane then turns to me: “So which house is yours?”
“The gray house by the dead end,” I say.
“The one with the lilies?” she says.
I nod.
“His mom has cancer,” Shane says to Taylor. “She’s dying.”
I punch his shoulder hard enough to hurt him. We’re not supposed to talk about our mother’s illness. It’s for only our family to know and even then my brother and I aren’t told much. We don’t even t
alk about it at church anymore. The prayer sessions have stopped completely—partly because my mother can’t handle the trips to church and partly because Father Brian has disappeared. It’s all but confirmed he’s got a girlfriend.
Shane rubs his shoulder and mumbles something about cancer and dying before going back to his fireworks.
“Cancer?” Taylor says. She kneels down next to my chair. I smell the strawberry scent of her shampoo. “My grandmother died of cancer last winter,” she says. “I hate cancer.”
“Well, so do I,” I say. “We have that in common.”
Taylor looks at me for a moment and starts laughing. She rests her hand on my forearm. Her lips open to speak but above us the sky starts to explode. Justin and Cory light off fireworks from PVC pipes they’ve dug into the ground. My brother places new fireworks into a pipe after one has been touched off.
The dark sky is aglow with the reds and whites and greens of firework explosions. We cheer. There’s shouting throughout the neighborhood for Justin’s display.
I look down at Taylor’s fingers resting on my forearm. Her pink nail polish is chipping at the cuticles. Her touch is warm. I feel a tremor in my chest as the fireworks boom. Taylor’s neck is bent; she smiles up at the sky.
Justin, Cory and my brother continue to light off fireworks in a display that is more impressive than the show our town puts on every year over the polluted lake. Taylor’s hand doesn’t move from my forearm. Every so often, she turns to me and smiles.
When her hand does slip off my arm, she’s staring at the gate. A man in a white T-shirt and a dark mustache surveys the yard. He doesn’t seem to notice the fireworks exploding above us.
Taylor leans in and whispers something to me, but I can’t make out her words over the fireworks. Her breath is hot on my ear. She stands and runs to the gate, her white sneakers lit red by the explosion in the sky.
The man recognizes Taylor, grabbing her by the arm, and Taylor is gone. My skin is still warm where her hand has been. I lean back in my chair and watch the night sky erupt.
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect Page 8