The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

  “It could be like Lord of the Flies,” Jason says. “Fear and survival. Attack and murder. Primal. Totally primal.”

  “Shakespeare’s a dick. A sexist pig,” Susan says, daughter of doting helicopter parents who make sure she has the best education, Tommy Hilfiger clothing, all the necessary orthodontia. “I mean most of the women in his plays seem like victims. Don’t you think he’s sexist, Mrs. Brown?”

  Nora leans on her desk, shifts her weight. “Well, in the context of the conventions of his day …”

  “Yeah, it’s like, now we know Spam sucks, but in the fifties it was totally cool,” Jason says.

  “What about Queen Elizabeth?” Lidia asks. “She ran England when Shakespeare was alive.”

  “She was an exception,” Nora says. “Most women then had a pretty raw deal. And don’t think she had it easy. People came up with all kinds of reasons for her success—that she was a man in disguise, for example, or that she surrounded herself with men because she was too stupid to make her own decisions. Only recently has her success been attributed to her brilliance.” Nora pauses for a moment. Her eyes meeting all the curious eyes looking at her, listening to her. Tiny surges of strength fire through her body, and she feels a singular awareness of who she is now, in this moment. She is a teacher. She is strong. She is not her past. She continues as if the earlier nausea, the fears, never existed, her voice clear and confident. “Women during Shakespeare’s time were a long way from having any rights and were in one way or another the property of men, either their fathers or their husbands.” She thinks then of Ophelia and her parting shot, her suicide, her refusing to be the plaything of men. “There’s still a huge battle ahead for equality,” she says.

  “So you’re a feminist?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  Elizabeth smiles slightly.

  Jason says, “My brother says feminists are haters. Feminazis.”

  “Hmmm,” Nora says. “No denying feminism is a loaded word, and when people are threatened, they look for something negative. But it doesn’t mean we should run from the word—that would be kind of what the name-callers want, right? Millions of people around the world suffer from racism, sexism, and extremism, and feminists are people who want equal rights for all people, regardless of sex or gender, so until those rights are equal, until everyone receives equal pay for the same job, until everyone has equal representation in government, until all people in every country can vote, have rights to their own bodies, yeah, I’m a feminist.”

  “My mom’s pretty happy about Janet Reno getting appointed attorney general,” Chrissy says, trying to diffuse things.

  “Is Reno a woman?” Jason asks, smirking. “She looks like a man. An ugly man.”

  “Jason,” Nora says. “Considering half the population is female, and less than 16 percent are represented in Congress, Clinton’s appointment of Reno was pretty important for feminism. Reno is now one of the most powerful people in the government. And she’s also a constant reminder that femininity looks different for every woman—she’s changing the standard for beauty.”

  “Unlike male rappers,” Susan says, glaring at Trevor, a tall, black kid drumming his fingers on his desk, making musical instrument sounds with his mouth.

  “What you talkin’ ’bout?” Trevor says. “I don’t put women down.”

  “Seriously? It’s like every other word is ‘bitch’ and ‘ho,’ and you’re always saying things like ‘The girl’s been had,’ like she’s some kind of object.”

  “Hey, man, I’m just representin’ what’s around me,” Trevor says. “You don’t like it, start your own group. Damn, why you get so angry?”

  “It’s up to all of you to educate yourselves, organize, and take up the unfinished business of the movement for equality,” Nora says. “Now, turn to Act I, Scene I, and let’s talk about iambic pentameter.”

  Nora sits at her desk eating tuna out of a plastic container and tries hard to focus on grading papers.

  “Mrs. Brown?” Elizabeth leans on the doorframe.

  Nora sets her fork in the container and wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. Elizabeth looks formidable with her hard-edged posture and Kurt Cobain T-shirt. If she can stay in school, she’s one of those young women who could change the world.

  “Hey, Elizabeth. What’s up?”

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you about this?” She holds out a copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

  “Yes, of course. Have a seat.”

  Elizabeth sits, straight up, her face tight. She clutches the book to her breast.

  “Elizabeth, are you okay?”

  “My mother’s forming a committee to ban this from the school library. God, she’s so ignorant, so inane.”

  Nora stands and walks around to the front of her desk, leans against it. “Did she say why?”

  “Pornography. Can you believe it? Where is there pornography in this book?”

  Nora shakes her head. “That’s wrong. So wrong.” A slight thudding begins in her chest.

  “I love this book,” Elizabeth says. “I love the little girl, Pecola.” She holds the book again to her breast, and her eyes well. “It makes me so sad to think of her praying for blue eyes—that she thought everything would be all right if only she had blue eyes—that if she had them, someone would love her and her life would be saved and things would be different.” And now, Elizabeth is crying, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  Nora reaches for a box of Kleenex from her desk, holds it out to her. This girl breaks her heart. This girl knows something about anger and pain and sadness. Nora wants to pull her close, take her home, and wrap her in a fluffy blanket.

  Elizabeth pulls out a Kleenex, wipes her eyes. “And you know what’s really fucked up?”

  “What?” Nora says quietly.

  “That she thought if she had blue eyes she would see differently.” Her words break apart. “That it’s not—it’s not the rest of us who are messed up—it’s her.”

  “She was a victim,” Nora says in a soft voice. “She didn’t get to have a normal teenage life, if there is such a thing. She didn’t get to discover life, let alone her sexuality, on her own terms.” Heat rises in her chest. “Makes me angry,” she whispers. “Men and their power issues.”

  Elizabeth looks at her then, just looks at her and stays quiet for a while—and then her face softens, and she says through her tears, “You know what’s really wrong? That the narrator makes it seem like if her father hadn’t been humiliated as a child he might not have hurt Pecola. Like he’s a victim or something! It was his fault! It’s the entire town’s fault!” She catches her breath and then whispers, “And now if the book is banned, it’s like we’re silencing her all over again.”

  Nora leans over and puts her arms around her. “I’ll fight for the book, Elizabeth. I promise.”

  That night Nora awakens from a recurring bad dream—the one where she runs through a dangerous neighborhood at night looking for her car. She runs past junkies and barred windows and pimps who shout things at her: “Hey baby, come to Daddy.” And then, ahead, her car, and shit! There are punks vandalizing it, and she hides—always in the same place, between two old brick buildings—and watches, heart thudding, as the punks rip apart her VW Bug. She watches, cramped and panicked, her hand over her mouth as they wrench off the tires, smash the windows, and tear out the stereo. The one in the black ski mask flips out a blade and gouges a jagged line from the driver’s door to the rear bumper before they all run, arms carrying things that belong to her, into the darkness. Nora scans the street, and when she’s sure they’re gone, she makes herself walk to the stripped car. She stands near the heap of red metal, sickened by the trespass, her entire body trembling in the silence and confusion.

  “God, that’s so classic,” Paul had said to her, years ago, when she’d described the nightmar
e. “A classic dream of stolen identity. You don’t know who you are.”

  His remarks had infuriated her at the time, though she’d finally dismissed them, believing he’d been frustrated because they hadn’t had sex in months, but now thoughts of Margaret, her words, I am a bad girl, infiltrate her mind, nausea rising into her throat until she can no longer stay in bed but must go to the closet in search of the orange shoe box. She can’t go on feeling the way she does, inhabited by an imaginary being making outrageous claims. She will prove Margaret isn’t real, prove she’s purely a symptom of fatigue, frantic hormones, or an iron deficiency or something.

  Nora slips into the closet like an unarmed thief. She shuts herself inside and turns on the light. It’s a huge closet. On the left: Paul’s shirts (at least twenty white and blue Ralph Lauren oxfords), sport jackets, and pants (ten pleated khaki, ten black dressy, a half a dozen jeans) hang neatly, and underneath it all, ten pairs of black dress shoes and ten pairs of athletic shoes planted precisely on a metal shoe tree. On the right: her mess. Blouses, skirts, dresses, and coats—a palette of blues, blacks, and grays hang sloppily in no particular order, some piled on the floor, mixing in with her dirty clothes until she can’t tell the difference.

  There’s a safe feeling here though, one of containment and familiarity. When she was little she’d spent hours and hours alone in her closet, hiding there with her flashlight to read and write stories about trees and birds and worlds that made sense. Sometimes, after her mother had too many gins, James would find her and ask with a look that alarmed her if he could come in too. And then later he’d say, tearfully, “Let’s never go out.”

  Now, she pushes to the back of the closet, where she keeps the shoes she doesn’t wear but might someday, and notices, as if for the first time, the number of shoe boxes, at least thirty, stacked high and in no apparent order. Saucony, Brooks, New Balance, Birkenstock, Doc Martens, Steve Madden, Nine West, Vera Wang. There is only one Vera Wang pair. She’d found the glittery, flirty shoes at a consignment store years ago and had hoped to wear them to a Clinton Inaugural event at the Seattle Center, but when Paul said there was no way in hell he’d go with her, no way he’d ever support a fucking “New Democrat,” she’d decided not to go after all but kept the shoes anyway.

  Her eyes scan the columns for the orange box with the white check mark—a Nike box. She would be surprised if she still had Nikes, was sure she’d thrown out the few she had when she’d heard the allegations of abuse in their factories in Asia, their exploitation of children as laborers. But there it is, an orange Nike box, near the bottom of the first column of boxes.

  She stares at it, her heart racing like a caged animal. She grits her teeth, refusing to let herself panic, and stretches her body up to remove the boxes above the orange one so the entire column doesn’t fall. By the time she finally gets to the Nike box, her hands are shaking. She hesitates for a moment, then picks it up. It is heavy, and immediately there is the jangle of coins. She sets the box on the floor, kneels, and with trembling hands removes the lid. It’s full of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. She touches the coins as if they might not be real. Then she notices things under the coins. A small brown box, a tiny white envelope, and folded pieces of notebook paper. She opens the brown box first. Draws a breath. Her rosary beads—the beads from the rosary her mother had broken. Her cheeks blazing, remembering that moment, Nora counts the opaque blue beads. Forty-nine. She remembers ten beads had been lost. And here is the crucifix. She remembers placing the forty-nine beads with the crucifix in a jar under her bed, and once her mother had died, once she’d been sent to Ireland, she’d never seen the beads again. How is this possible? Could she really have forgotten she’d found them? Placed them in this box in her closet?

  She picks up the white envelope. No writing on either side. She opens it. A holy card. A pin-pricking charge ripples across her skin. On the front, a woman with a ring of stars around her head, body draped in purple, a gold sword held high, her right foot on a dragon’s head. On the back, typed words in gilded print: st. margaret, patron saint of the falsely accused and those in exile, help us. Nora sits perfectly still in the silence. Eyes fixed on the holy card, the beads, the coins, items she has no recollection of saving in this box. A realization hits her hard—she needs to take Margaret very seriously. Margaret may be an invention of her consciousness, ludicrous, contrary to reason, but nonetheless, Margaret knows things. Things that Nora does not. Still, Nora thinks, nausea rising again, that doesn’t mean her words about my father are true. “Go away,” Nora whispers out loud to Margaret. “Please go away.”

  And finally, the white notebook paper. She unfolds the pages slowly. It’s a story she’d written on her tenth birthday. She remembers writing this. She’d gone into her closet one afternoon to stay out of her mother’s way until her father got home. He was going to bring a birthday cake.

  Promises

  Once, a long time ago, a mother and father took their new baby girl across the sea to Ireland to have it baptized by an Irish priest because the mother said Irish priests were closer to God than priests in Chicago and because the mother had not seen her family since she was eighteen years old and now she is twenty-one. In America she met her husband and married him.

  On the morning of the baptism, it was very stormy and the hawthorn trees outside the church were shivering in the wind and people had to bend their heads down just to walk. The grandmother and grandfather and seven aunts and their husbands and two uncles and their wives and one uncle who was too young to have a wife yet and twelve children were going to the baptism. The neighbors were going too. Everyone walked for miles in a long line to the church.

  The father looked extremely handsome, like a prince. He was twenty-two years old. He wore a navy-blue suit with a white shirt and a sea-green tie. He wanted to wear his new black hat but it kept blowing off in the wind so he carried it in his hand. The mother wore a lovely violet dress and a matching violet hat pinned into her long, flaming-red hair.

  The baby wore a special white gown worn by her mother at her own baptism. The gown was made by the mother’s great-great-grandmother Brighid. She knit the white gown from the finest white yarn. She made the yarn herself from the wool of her own fine sheep.

  Babies must wear white to show they are spotless in the eyes of God.

  Everyone went inside the church except for the grandfather who waited outside because he didn’t like churches.

  Inside the church, it was dark, it was very dark and the baby became scared and began to cry and so the mother carried her to a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary up by the altar. The Virgin Mary held out her arms out as if she wanted to hold the baby. The baby stared at the statue and stopped crying.

  The mother stood with the father and the priest in front of everyone and held the baby tight in her arms. An altar boy dressed in white held a golden tray with two golden chalices upon it. One chalice was filled with holy water and the other held perfumed oil blessed by the bishop. The water would wash away the sins of the baby and give her new life. The oil would give the baby power from the Holy Ghost.

  The priest sprinkled drops of holy water and perfumed oil on the baby’s forehead and said to the father in a loud voice, “Do you promise to love this baby with all your heart and soul?”

  And the father said, “Yes, I promise.”

  And the priest said, “Do you promise to protect her from all harm?”

  And the father said, “Yes, I do.”

  And then the priest said to the mother, “Do you promise to love this baby with all your heart and soul?”

  And the mother said, “Yes, I promise.”

  And the priest said, “Do you promise to protect her and keep her safe and protect her from all harm?”

  And the mother said, “Yes, I promise.”

  And then the priest turned to the Godparents and asked them to make promises too.

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nbsp; Then the priest took the baby from the mother and lifted her up high and said, “I baptize thee Nora in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Oh, Almighty God, may you bless this child and help her mother and father keep their promises forever and if they don’t, please help save the girl. Amen.” And then all the people in the church said, “Amen,” and the priest gave the baby back to the mother.

  After the baptism everyone walked down the road to the pub to celebrate because the baby’s soul was saved. When they got there the mother was tired and she set the baby on a hard bench and went to get a drink at the bar. The baby became frightened and started to cry but the grandfather came and held her in his arms. He dipped his finger in whiskey and put it on her lips and sang, “The violets were scenting the woods, Nora, displaying their charm to the bee,” until the baby fell asleep.

  Nora wipes her eyes and wills her hands to place everything back in the box, wills them to put the lid on and shove it back into place, piling the other boxes, one by one, on top of it. She will not think about this anymore tonight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  January 31, 1997

  The next morning, Nora sits at her desk sipping coffee and writing comments on essays. It is necessary she keep her head in the game and not dwell on confessionals, shoe boxes, and saints. Outside the door, students slam lockers, establishing their positions by calling each other names: Gay. Loser. Shithead. The word “fuck” replacing most of their verbs, some of their nouns, and all of their adjectives. She takes a deep breath and opens the door. “Good morning,” she says, pretending cheerfulness to each one as they drift in, morose and heavy-lidded.