by Blair Hurley
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. It’s not a job. Is it your brother?”
“Not really. I needed a change.”
Nicole felt the warm glow of Jocelyn’s attention, the comfort of it. “Who called you the other night? What’s your story?”
This is how women made friends, Nicole thought, how they learned to trust people, by confiding their stories.
It was a secret that no one really understood. Sometimes when she was feeling poetic, she thought about it in terms of the stages of the Buddha’s life. The Prince; the Runaway; the Mendicant; the Saint. There she was in her bedroom in Boston, dreaming child dreams, safely enveloped in love. And then there she was, a teenager, smelling of weed, wary as a cat, creeping out of her house and into a car, riding away into the early suburban dawn before the birds began to sing. And then she was eighteen, busking on a street corner in a city she no longer remembered.
Just a few weeks ago, she’d stood shivering in the damp air on Sean’s porch, looking out at the marsh, scanning for the rustle and blue-gray of a heron. You could usually see them this time of year; they would be nesting soon, bound to one spot, and the males would be standing guard.
Leaving took time. There was paperwork, a subletter to find, her car to sell. When you are a Boston girl trying to leave your hometown, you begin with guilt and end with Irish good-byes. As she was making plans, another week passed and she hadn’t told Sean she was leaving. She spent the weekend at his house, playing poker and walking in the marsh and running her finger up and down his jawline, feeling for the stubble that wouldn’t yet be there until later in the evening.
Waking up beside him. Listening to his explanations of cherry, maple, mahogany, the care and love that goes into the graceful curve of a chair’s arms. Reading books with their legs entwined. Singing Boston songs in their cracked winter voices. Oh, I love that dirty water . . .
It wasn’t until the end of February, with Paul coming to pack her up, that she had to tell him.
“You look so sad,” he said when he opened the door.
“Well, I guess I am,” she said. “I have to tell you something.”
It was funny, hugging in a Boston winter. There were at least a few inches of puffy coat between them. “Can we go inside?” she asked.
“Well—” He hesitated. “It’s a mess. But okay.”
The living room was filling up. Furniture from the basement had migrated upstairs; two hat racks and a narrow armoire were in the foyer. The kitchen counters were crenellated with knickknacks, the living room, a showroom jumble. “I’ve been meaning to sort through all this,” said Sean. “I figured I’d finally get to it. It’ll look worse before it looks better.”
Nicole sat on a couch she didn’t remember having seen before and picked up, from the coffee table, a china dog with blue sideways-glancing eyes. “Do you have to keep all this old stuff?” It made her uneasy, the way the knickknacks and furniture had of pressing in. Shrinking the air and light of a space. It was hard to swing her elbows, to draw a deep breath. It reminded her of all that family furniture, her doomed inheritance, waiting for her in her childhood home.
She looked at papers in a stack threatening to topple: bills mixed with credit card offers. “Quite a mess here. Why do you keep these things?”
He said, “I like it, okay? Is there something wrong with liking things?”
Here now, was something: the beginning of a first fight. A nice, tidy reason to say good-bye. Something that would make this whole process easier. “This is excessive, don’t you think?” She felt exhilarated by her own cruelty.
“No, not really.” He took the china dog and stood there holding it tightly, as though afraid she might throw it across the room. But sometimes you had to push away what was toxic to you, didn’t you? And wouldn’t it be better for everyone—a quick, clean break?
He sat down beside her, moving aside a stack of newspapers. “So. Tell me what’s up.”
“Well.” She looked into her hands. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
He laughed. “Ditto.”
“Well—” And she stopped. She had planned to ignore the shaking in her hands and tell him everything. First, about the strict Catholic house she’d grown up in, and then the conversion. About how she ran away, and after, how her Master became the center her life, and how that center was eating her up.
But she could not say it. Sean would be surprised at first, and cover his disappointment. He would arch back away from her and try to smile. And then he would be ashamed of her, though he would be too kind to show it.
Better to have him think she had to leave. A job change. A restraining order. She flicked through the most acceptable lies. “It’s my father,” she said finally. “He’s sick. It’s been going on for a long time, but he’s worse. My brother wants me to come to New York.” It was not so far from the truth. It was just that her father had died ten years ago.
Sean bit his lip and nodded solemnly.
She added, “I’m sorry. I’ve had this feeling for a while—I have to get out of this place. It’d be better if you just forgot about me for a while.”
“Oh. Like we’d never met.”
Now she was angry. “We were just friends, weren’t we? Just friends having a good time?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Are. We’re still friends.”
“Are. Okay.”
“What do you want from me?” she demanded. “I don’t understand you!”
“What am I supposed to say? I’m not doing any better understanding you!” He looked away. “What do you really want me to say? That I don’t like you after all? That I’m some no-good piece-of-shit guy who just wants some tail? Would that make you feel better—to think of me as a douchebag?” He stood up. “All right. I’ll do that for you. I’ll do what you want. Bye, Nicole, I won’t miss that saggy white Irish ass of yours. There’s plenty more around this town.”
“That’s more like it.”
They sat in silence for a while. “Now we’re both sad,” he said. “Why do we both smile when we’re sad?”
“It’s a Puritan thing,” Nicole said.
“But we’re Catholics.”
“Boston Puritan Catholics.”
He sighed, and held on to her arm. “When do you leave?”
“My brother comes—”
“Don’t tell me. Stay with me until you go. Let’s make it an Irish good-bye.”
“I thought an Irish good-bye meant leaving without the other person knowing.”
“Exactly. You’ll stay with me, and then one day I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone. Haven’t you ever wanted to just—slip away, so you don’t cause another person pain?”
She laughed. And thought, Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve always wanted.
“So what’s your story?” Jocelyn asked.
Now she could feel the threat in Jocelyn’s innocent question, in her wide-open eyes. She could feel herself slipping. She had not been able to tell Sean her story; he was too close. But to tell a stranger? Why not? To walk the story away from herself for a little while. “Well, there’s my mother,” she began, hopeful, as she always was, that this time, she’d understand it all.
When she was back in her empty apartment, pouring kibble for Kukai, her phone rang in her bag. She fumbled for it, wondering if it was Sean, needing it to be him. She pressed the phone urgently to her ear.
“Hello,” said her Master. “It’s me.”
Dear Sean,
Siddhartha and his monks are gathered around the fire. The day’s begging is done, the meal is eaten; the moist evening air clamors with insects. The monks are squatting in their yellow robes. Even in the heat, they press close to the dying fire, trying to gain some protection from the insects with its smoke. There are nuns among them, too, staring into the flames, though it’s hard to distinguish them. They wear the same voluminous robes. Their heads are shaved and scabby. Their faces are
deeply creased. It is mostly older women, the widows, the mothers who have lost children, who take refuge here, with the man with the long fingers and toes and earlobes. They watch him out of the corner of their eyes, wondering if he feels the hunger they feel after just one bowl of rice a day. They want to please him. He looks like all of the other monks, but the group has instinctively angled toward him, listening. They really, really want to please him.
Look at the fire. He points, and they all look.
Look at the way it burns. We’re like that. We’re all burning up. Someone’s got to stop the burning.
He tells them they’re on fire. He says, If you were in a burning house and didn’t know it, I would tell you any lie just to get you to come out, to heed the danger. I would make promises I couldn’t keep. I would say great gifts were waiting for you. I’d say anything to make you safe.
My master said, You’re burning up, poor thing. I’ll put you out.
THE LIVING LIGHT
She told Jocelyn about her bronchitis when she was eight; there was something romantic about being young and sickly, wandering the house in her nightgown like a character out of Jane Eyre. She had lost her sense of smell and taste. The air had a disconcerting blankness that year, as if the world, with all its fresh mulch, its burnt toast, had ceased to speak to her.
There was nothing romantic, though, about the panicky feeling of too much fluid in her lungs. In the middle of the night, she sometimes woke to find her mother on the edge of the bed with a warm, wet rag, ready to cover her face because she had been coughing in her sleep. She remembered her mother pressing the bridge of her nose, the other hand on the back of her neck, the blurry smothering of the towel on her face. “There now. Breathe in.”
That was as good a place to begin as any.
She knew from a young age that her mother was beautiful. She was tall, freckled and slender, and wore high-waisted slacks and loose blouses of heavy silk. She was not like the other mothers, dumpy and cheerful, pushing cookies in pilled sweaters. She never wore jeans; she wore stockings and high heels to the grocery store. When the four of them were all stepping out to a restaurant, their father grinning sheepishly in his fat retro ties, still surprised that he had ended up with her, Nicole and Paul looked at each other approvingly, proud of their parents, the way they brought a European glamor to their woodsy, snowy suburb.
This was the early nineties in the suburbs of Boston, when the only adult woman Nicole knew who lived alone was their frizzy-haired neighbor who’d had her dead dog stuffed and mounted in the window. “It’s sad,” her mother said whenever they passed the house or saw her across the room at a party.
This was the early nineties, when Boston’s Big Dig was beginning and already over budget, a construction project that even preschoolers knew was going to change Boston forever. Her mother and father often hosted dinners for their friends and they all argued loudly about the destruction of the old Central Artery, the miles of tunnels that would bury Boston’s traffic, the changing landscape of the city. There was a lot of talk about “old Boston” and “new Boston,” but no one knew what “new Boston” would be. She remembered sitting in the kitchen with Paul, playing with toys and listening to their parents’ voices through the door more than the words, her father’s growing hoarse and deep, his voice a bulldozer, her mother’s a reedy flute. Sometimes her mother’s voice fell silent, leaving the chorus of the other adults. Then she would come into the kitchen holding a wine bottle by the neck with two fingers, and sit with them and silently pour herself a glass and another, looking faraway. Eventually, she’d be missed. “Liza, where are you?” a friend would call, and she’d touch Paul’s and Nicole’s heads and rejoin the party. Later that night they’d hear fighting in the bedroom: her father’s voice low and pleading this time, her mother’s louder and louder. Sometimes Nicole sat on the stairs and listened, struggling to understand: it was about humiliation, how could you say that, every time they come over you take their side. She pressed her forehead to the cool spindle of the railing. Soon they would quiet; they always did. Then, in the silence of the dark house, she could sleep.
This was before the Catholic churches began to close down and before the candlelight vigils were held. The scandals were beginning to break, but they were isolated, hushed, fodder for off-color jokes. At one of those dinners someone would make a crack about altar boys and the room would fill with uncomfortable laughter and her mother would promise to explain the joke later but never did.
It was when the wooded roads were still stacked with cars on Sundays and the pancake houses filled for after-Mass brunch. From her window Nicole could see their church, St. Augustine, through the trees of their neighborhood of Waban. She liked the church, the largeness and darkness of the old Gothic structure overlooking the highway. She liked the polished pews, the places where cracks in the wood had been lacquered over so that you couldn’t feel them with your fingers. She liked the sermons about fear and trembling, as though God was the hand grabbing her shoulder when she went down to the basement and all the bulbs were blown. It seemed right to be afraid of God, watching you in the dark and brooding over you, his motivations little understood.
Remembering church now, she still felt the same combination of affection and dread. The special hush, the dark, dusty recesses, the places her eyes wandered and could not find definition, the sweet, plaintive wording of the hymns. She liked everybody bundling up late at night on Christmas Eve and hurrying down the hill in their good shoes in time to sing. She liked having her forehead smudged with ash on Ash Wednesday, and wearing the ash to school, and nodding to other children with the same smear of black.
In the “children’s time,” as the priest called it, she and the other kids were called up around the altar and he would trot out the usual kid-friendly Bible tales and then ask them if they had been good this week, as if he were Santa. “What have you done to please Jesus, Nicole?”
She never had an answer. Why would Jesus, bleeding up there, nailed to his cross, his eyes rolling in despair toward heaven, care if she’d flossed her teeth or cleared the table? He wasn’t her friend, and he wasn’t supposed to be; he was mysterious. He was a secret key to the universe’s code. The code was written in blood and incense, in stained glass and silk, in bread and wine.
Back then, she used to see a gaggle of nuns go down the street or one alone in an airport and wonder what their lives were like. She took books about nuns out of the library, pedaling on her bike alone so she wouldn’t have to show her mother what she’d gotten. She looked at golden-hued paintings of Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval nun who had received ecstatic visions of the Lord, who’d called what she saw “the living light.”
What was the living light? Was it like being blinded by the fiery globe of the sun? Was it the flare of spots in your eyes after a camera flash?
She tried to imagine what ecstasy felt like.
This mystical world was better, somehow, than the ordinary world in which she lived. In her room, she swept a long black scarf off a shelf and draped it over her head. She worked her mother’s rosary between her fingers. It was strange and exciting, as if she were entering a mysterious adult world and not the bright, chattering, stressful world of school.
With the scarf over her head, she pressed her hands together, said an Our Father, rolled her eyes piously to heaven the way Mary did in paintings. That was when Paul walked by her bedroom door. “Hey, it’s Sister Nicole,” he said, laughing.
She tore the scarf off her head, but Paul wrestled it back on, holding her down. “It suits you!”
“Get off!” She struggled and squirmed and spat, but he had six years on her.
“Come see her, Mom,” Paul crowed. “The little sister. The child bride of Christ.”
Nicole finally snatched the scarf away as their mother appeared in the doorway. “Don’t make fun of her, Paul. It’s sweet.”
“Forgive me, Sister Nicole,” said Paul, and he made a sweeping bow. She punched him a
s hard as she could, and he laughed again. “Not very nunlike,” he said.
Sometimes the bronchitis shifted from chronic to acute and she was allowed to stay home from school. On these sick days, Nicole discovered that after sending Paul off, her mother sometimes returned to bed and slept till ten or eleven, or on into the afternoon. The house was a different place when she was the only one awake in it, the only creature making noise and turning lights on and off. There were whole rooms visited only on holidays that she explored, playing with the crystal animals on the credenza, staring at the knickknacks and family photos. There were so many things to see: ceramic Chinese dragons and little chipped plaster statues of Saint Jude and creepy antique rag dolls in blackface with giant eyes and red-ringed lips. She felt safe because of the presence of her mother upstairs.
When her mother came down, fully dressed, her face composed, she tried out new recipes, teaching Nicole to crack garlic with the flat of the knife before peeling it, to wash the rice of starch, to detect the right shades of red and pink and gray that made up rare, medium rare, and medium steak. On these winter sick days, she made the hearty stews and cassoulets, teaching Nicole the words in French for each part of the dish, letting her stir great ceramic pots of spicy sausage and aged confit with white beans softened overnight in bowls of water. Then she sat down and wrote the story of each dish’s creation for a small food column that ran bimonthly in a local magazine.
On some days she stirred the stews and mashed potatoes in silence. “Keep up,” she snapped. “Use some elbow grease. If you can’t do this, you’d better hope you marry someone rich.”
Nicole pounded her bowl of dough or batter until it felt like her arm might catch on fire, and then her mother softened along with the mixture. “What a good job you’re doing. My little goose.” Her tenderness was always a gift, exciting and frightening all at once because you never knew when it might crack and fall to pieces. She and Paul both knew a certain tone of voice—a frail shimmer—and the fear of it was deeper than her fear of the dark or of her lungs filling completely when she was sick, deeper than the fear of a hand grabbing her on the basement stairs or the one corner of their street where the lamplight did not reach. She was eight years old. There was already so much to be afraid of.