Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  There I was, still me, still with this family still in this house.

  I didn’t hear Sis actually say the words, but she told them, all right.

  On the other side of the locked door, the silence of the deep.

  Then screaming and yelling like thunder and lightning. Sis getting smacked around good. Mom cussing a blue streak. Sis was really wailing.

  My face up against the mirror, I looked at everything about me so close. Somewhere in there, in me, there was a person who Billie Cody found interesting and smart and handsome, said she loved. All I could see was the bad lighting. All I could hear was the war going on in the next room.

  My big nose, my crooked bottom teeth, funny ears, curly hair. Zits, always zits on my face. Clueless. How I wished for something more, something else. In my life, in them — the people who reared me, molded me, showed me the dimensions and the qualities of the world.

  Oh my heavens pretty woman so far.

  How I wished I was someone else.

  From someone else.

  Authentic.

  Up close to my eyes, my almond-shaped hazel eyes, inside deep in the mirror, I looked for something graceful, true, beautiful. I looked for God.

  The only thing I saw was the fickle fucker who gave us our five senses, gave us sex, some smarts, and then set us loose. It was up to us to do the rest.

  Frood had a theory. Jean Paul Sartre had a theory. Saint Thomas More.

  Theories, fucking theories, man.

  Two hours ago, I felt so warm and floaty kissing Billie, and now in this mirror in this moment, screaming and yelling and crying, punishment, exploding hell and damnation.

  The sex-shame-guilt thing.

  Doom everywhere.

  Maybe there was no God, but I still had Billie.

  7 Going to the Chapel

  MERCIFUL LORD, HOLY Lord, Son of the Father, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, Sis was pregnant, and for a while there the whole world went crazy, and nothing made any sense.

  Sis had committed the gravest of sins.

  She’d sinned against the Holy Virgin.

  And raised the devil.

  That very night, Mom made us drop to our knees. Not one, not two, but three rosaries we prayed, all sorrowful mysteries. Then an endless string of litanies.

  Fucking litanies, man.

  Sis cried most of the way through the first rosary and only stopped after Mom got up after the fifth sorrowful mystery, the Crucifixion, and slapped Sis silly. You can be sure that after that, there wasn’t a peep out of Sis. We were on our prayer bones till almost two A.M.

  Bright and early the next morning, Mom and Sis were doing eighty to the confessional and a private audience with the Monsignor. Sis was going to get married and fast.

  That first week, I thought for sure Mom was going back to the Russell days. That migraine look was in her eyes. The rosary, the rosary, the rosary, pray the rosary. Out loud in her bedroom, whispered in the living room, her rough, red farm hands going over the beads. Once she even ran out in the field, and Dad couldn’t find her anywhere, and I found her in my secret place on top of the granaries. She was lying prostrate in the little place that’s the shape of an hourglass, her arms out like a cross. She didn’t move, only the wind in her hair. Then I saw her fingers, slow rolling over the beads.

  Dad totally disappeared. Too bad he didn’t drink, or he could’ve got drunk, but his dad was the drunk, so Dad didn’t drink, he just acted like a drunk. Gruff old bastard. And he was spoiling to get into it with me. I had to watch every move I made. All of a sudden I had twice the irrigating to do, and weeds to pull and ditches to burn, and the Augean calf pens I had to haul shit out of. I was fucking Hercules, man.

  I felt sorry for Sis. She was alone with her sin. Not that it was a sin, but she thought it was. My attempts to talk to her went nowhere. She was pregnant and scared and alone, and all I was was her little brother. Strange, though, what another life can make you do. As the days went on, Sis with her baby inside her, slow but sure, a change started to come about. It was as if the baby growing inside her was growing a place for Sis too, a place to come out on her own.

  Mom didn’t speak to Sis, not once, the whole time before the wedding ceremony. When Mom wanted to say something to Sis, she said it to me, then I told Sis. Can you imagine — the dress, the fittings, the invitations, ordering the cake — the whole schmeer? All Mom did was mumble litanies under her breath, and never once looked up at her pregnant daughter or said a fucking word to her.

  At first, all Sis could do was keep her distance from Mom. After a while, though, Sis figured out that two could play that game. And the Mom-Sis War began.

  I wish to hell I’d have done some figuring myself. How to get my ass out from in between those two.

  The night Gene Kelso came over for cake and ice cream, there was no shotgun loaded by the dinner table, but there might as well have been. Everybody had their Sunday clothes on, and it was Tuesday. Sis looked particularly nice, tanned in her yellow summer dress and blue eye shadow. Mom had never allowed blue eye shadow. Even Gene, who always wore Levi’s riding low on his hips and a white T-shirt with KELSO PLUMBING on it every time I’d ever seen him, wore a shirt and tie. It was an ugly tie. Green and gold with a weird pattern. Looked like butterflies and dice.

  It was weird, all of us sitting at the table. No one moved. I mean, our arms moved and our mouths opened and closed, but our bodies didn’t move, and when they did move, our bodies looked like in our heads we’d been practicing how to move, and then all of a sudden decided it was time.

  When Gene got up to leave, it was the sound of the chairs scraping the floor. All of a sudden everybody came alive.

  Mom said: Joe has spoken to Monsignor about the special dispensations.

  Dad said: They just have to announce the wedding banns three weeks in a row.

  Mom said: It wasn’t easy.

  Dad said: Monsignor owed me a favor.

  Mom said: It took an arm and a leg.

  Dad said: You’ll have to pay us back.

  Mom said: You’re the ones who got yourselves into this mess.

  Dad said: Hell of a way to start out a life together.

  Mom said: You think it’s easy. But it isn’t easy.

  Dad said: You’ll need all the help you can get.

  Mom said: It isn’t easy at all.

  Dad said: You’re going to find out.

  Mom said: Your work is cut out for you.

  Dad said: You got to make a life for yourself and your family.

  Mom said: At first, it’s all lovey-dovey. It’s all music and laughter.

  Mom said: At first, you have no way of knowing how hard it’s going to be.

  But there’s more. As fate would have it, a lot more. When Sis fucked Gene Kelso and got pregnant, a crack opened up in the world we thought we lived in, and nothing was ever the same again. Sis didn’t just break a commandment, she went right to the heart of the matter and banged on the door. The Joe Kluseners went from a family who never could talk about sex to a family whose sexual secret became the sole conversation of Saint Joseph’s Church. Really, they might as well have announced it in the Sunday bulletin. Mom said she couldn’t show her face at Mass again, and both those Sunday mornings before the wedding it took all Dad had to get Mom in the car. Then at church to get her out of the car. I swear, if Mom and Dad weren’t Catholic and knew only one way, their marriage would’ve been toast. Then the night after the wedding dance, what happened between my mom and dad I’m still trying to figure out.

  Then to top it all off, with the sin against the Holy Virgin, and the wedding and the Mom-Sis War, somehow another female got sucked into it.

  Billie.

  Thank God for promises and good reefer. Without them, Billie and I would never have made it.

  My own part in the drama began one evening in the kitchen. Mom at the counter beating away at some batter in a bowl turned her head over her shoulder, and said: Wh
at about the girlfriend? It would be nice to finally meet her. What’s her name? She’s got a boy’s name.

  Billie, I said.

  Why don’t you invite the girlfriend to the wedding? Mom said.

  That was the moment right there when all the chaos whirling around outside me wasn’t outside at all anymore. It was inside.

  That night, Billie and I in the Shanghai Café, Billie was acting a little strange, but then everything was a little strange with the wedding and all.

  The ashtray on the table was full of cigarette butts and ashes. Billie’s last cigarette was stamped out in the ashtray but still smoking. When I looked at Billie, there was something in her eyes. I guessed it was tear duct cancer, or the smoke from the cigarette, but just then a tear busted loose and rolled down her cheek.

  Why don’t we go to Mount Moriah anymore? Billie said. I miss being close to you.

  Right then, there was something awful got inside me. I had no idea what it was. Butts and ashes, smoke from the smashed-out cigarette. As I look back on it now, if you don’t ever stop and take a good look at yourself, your fear can wear just about anybody’s face.

  As I sat there looking into Billie’s blue eyes, suddenly Billie Cody, my best friend, turned into something awful.

  Billie had ugly red, weepy eyes and cigarette breath and tiny fingernails and stupid hair. She was just another female who wanted to make me do stuff I didn’t want to do.

  I couldn’t put a name on what I was feeling, but right then I wanted to get away from her.

  Then I hated myself for feeling that way, so I tried to cover it up.

  I reached into the ashtray and crushed the smoky cigarette out.

  I’m sorry, I said. It’s this wedding, I said. And Sis.

  My hand was squeezed around my clear plastic water glass. What I wanted to do with that glass was throw it against the wall.

  Instead, I poured water from my water glass into the ashtray. The quick hiss of water on fire.

  I haven’t told you something, I said. Something important.

  A big mess of ashes and floating butts over the side of the ashtray, a puddle onto the table.

  Sis is pregnant, I said.

  And Mom won’t speak to Sis.

  Sis doesn’t have anybody else but me, I said.

  Wet black ash in my nostrils. My paper napkin on the puddle, wet and black soaking up through.

  Sis is so alone, I said.

  And now Mom wants me to ask you to the wedding, I said.

  Billie’s hands came across the table. She folded her hands around my hands. I wanted to pull my hands away, but I kept my hands under Billie’s.

  When I looked back up into Billie’s eyes, Billie was the old Billie. There she was again, not ugly or sniveling, but my friend, looking at me, deep inside at me.

  Rig, Billie said, I’m so sorry. Of course I’ll go to the wedding with you.

  The awful scared feeling inside me went away, and I loved God so much right then.

  Billie took her hands away and made herself busy lighting a cigarette, inhaling, exhaling.

  There’s just one thing, Billie said.

  I could tell the way Billie said just one thing that she was going to say something a whole lot smarter than I was.

  Billie’s cigarette was the whirlwind by her ear.

  Do you want me to come to the wedding, Billie said, because you want me to come to the wedding?

  Her right arm down to the puddle around the ashtray, the speedometer needle going from eighty to zero. Her index finger knocking off the ash.

  Or do you want me to come, Billie said, because your mother wants me to come?

  Inside me and outside me, all over everywhere, and Billie was ugly again.

  Sirens and horns and alarms going off. Or some deep, low sound, a fart or burp. The fear I’d never looked at wanted to get the fuck out of there.

  I pushed a Winston up out of the pack. Put it in my mouth. Lit it.

  Inhaling is breathing.

  If I waited long enough, some kind of words would come out of my mouth.

  Billie Cody and I sitting in a pew together in Saint Joseph’s Church was impossible to imagine. Kneeling and praying and genuflecting and sitting and listening to the sermon, impossible. Billie and Mom and Sis all in the church all together during Mass, impossible. Dad ushering Billie and I to a pew, impossible. Going up to receive Communion while Billie sat in the pew, impossible.

  It’s impossible, I blurted out. I don’t want to be in that church with you.

  Billie’s cigarette a windshield wiper back and forth, back and forth.

  Maybe, Billie said, you should ask a girl more suited to the festivities.

  Billie’s eyes were blue and clear. I’d never seen her angry before.

  I was in some kind of quagmire I didn’t know.

  More breath, I inhaled cigarette smoke.

  On the exhale: It isn’t you, Billie, I said. I just can’t imagine doing all that Catholic shit in front of you. I’d feel like a big fucking phony.

  And then a little light came inside my darkness.

  It’s hard enough to put that act on for myself, I said. Every Sunday. But to do it in front of you, I couldn’t do it.

  Billie looked a lot like Mom sitting there, something tight in her, Billie’s face somewhere behind the smoke she was exhaling.

  The Shanghai got even brighter. I don’t know how that is possible, but the place got even brighter. Billie smoked. I smoked. We just sat there like we weren’t ourselves anymore, like we were Mom and Dad and Sis and Gene Kelso at the dinner table that day.

  Absurd. Theater of the absurd.

  The fear inside me was that I had lost Billie and at the same time the fear was that I’d never lose her.

  When Billie spoke, she was Simone Signoret.

  You say you love to dance, Billie said. We’ve never danced.

  Billie’s eyes were blue and not red, and she wasn’t ugly.

  What do you say? Billie said, I meet you at the reception dance at the Green Triangle. That way I don’t have to go to Mass, you and I get to dance, and I can meet your mother.

  A genius.

  Billie Cody was back to being my best friend and a genius.

  Later on that night, when I walked Billie up her windy front steps, past the lamp with the ivy growing on it, I kissed Billie open-mouthed and hard, lots of tongue.

  I didn’t really want to kiss her like that. I just wanted to kiss my friend and hold her. A boy was supposed to kiss a girl hard after what Billie and I had just been through.

  Billie looked up into my eyes. Her blue eyes were looking into my eyes trying to find something.

  I opened the aluminum screen door.

  The C’s not for Cody, I said.

  No, Billie said. It’s for cunt, she said. And you’d better not forget it.

  Sis just barely fit into her size ten wedding gown. I should know, I was the one who had to zip up the placket in the back. Sis had stood in front of her mirror in her bedroom all morning, crying and crying. Totally freaked out. About everything. Getting married, being pregnant. Gene Kelso and his white socks. All the people coming to the wedding, you name it. But mostly what freaked Sis out was that the baby showed. The truth is, though, what was really bothering Sis was Mom.

  The morning of the wedding the Mom-Sis War was no differnt. Mom wasn’t with her daughter. Mom was knelt down in her bedroom praying the rosary.

  I told Sis. Sis, I said, don’t worry. I said, It don’t show that much. Hardly at all. It’s fine, I said. Don’t worry, nobody can tell.

  The church was crowded with aunts and uncles and cousins and members of the congregation. A solemn high nuptial Mass. One of those Masses that goes on forever. Organ music and the choir.

  The theme of the wedding pretty much was daisies. White daisies with a yellow center. Mom’s hat was a swooping bonnet with white daisies, and her dress was yellow, and so was Francie Lutz’s, Sis’s maid of honor. Francie wore a swooping bo
nnet with white daisies too, and she carried a bouquet of white daisies. Sis’s bouquet was white daisies and yellow roses. Two big bouquets of white daisies on the altar.

  Gene Kelso looked really hung over. His duck’s ass was dragging. He wore a black suit, but not like Dad’s. Gene’s was shiny, and he wore a skinny, shiny black tie. He didn’t wear Levi’s, but when he knelt down everybody could see his white socks.

  Gene’s best man was a guy named Chuck diPietro. He was as hung over as Gene. Chuck had a cherried-out ’57 Chevy pickup and was friends with Joe Scardino. Chuck was a big guy, big arms and chest, curly dark hair. One time in grade school, he threw a snowball at me and hit me right in the eye. Another Italian. He worked at the Sinclair station on Fifth Street, but back in high school, he played quarterback on Highland’s football team. He had a white daisy boutonniere too.

  Remember this guy, Chuck diPietro. Believe me, we’re going to come back to Chuck diPietro.

  The Wedding March. The one that in your head you always sing: Here comes the bride, all fat and wide. Here comes the groom, skinny as a broom.

  Sis taking a long step, then a short step, alongside of Dad, holding onto Dad’s arm. It was quite a sight, Sis in her white gown and veil and white daisies and yellow roses. Sis smiling so big her gums showed. And something else showed too. Sis’s breasts were almost as big as Billie’s, and down around her stomach — no doubt about it — it was a baby down there all right.

  Myself, no way I wanted to be best man, or flower boy, or ring bearer, or whatever the fuck things you can be in a wedding. Sis wanted me to be one of the altar boys, but after that novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help, I’d sworn off the altar boy shit. Sis threw one of her fits and would have gone crying to Mom, but of course it was the Mom-Sis War, so that was that. My job at the wedding was to sit in a pew. And wear a white daisy in my lapel.

  It was better than having a yellow tulip up my ass.

  Mom was in the choir, up and far away. Dad was giving away Sis, and when he wasn’t doing that, he went back to his old job as usher. I was alone because I wanted to be alone, that is, not with Billie Cody.

  Sis was insulted that my girlfriend wasn’t going to come to her wedding.