by Suzzy Roche
Now, standing in the middle of an A&P, in the small, forgotten town of Hanzloo, Pennsylvania, with an empty, restless heart, he wondered what had it all been for?
Clarisse McCarthy was smiling at him, noticing the stains on his shirt.
“Looks like you’ve been painting the house,” she said. The twins moved closer to their mother.
“My dad’s an artist,” said Felix.
Luke cringed.
“Oh, really?” said Clarisse.
Felix kept at it. “Remember when you slapped me?” he said, looking up at her, as he popped the last piece of bologna in his mouth. Clarisse shot the boy a look, and Luke remembered all over again how much he didn’t like her. What the hell.
“Mama, let’s leave,” said Fawn, pulling on her mother’s skirt.
Luke noticed Alice then, and was struck once again by her simple beauty, of which she seemed totally unaware. Even with her hair tied up in frilly pink bows, her features were serene, and ordinary, but like her mother, a second look revealed more; something otherworldly, and Luke thought he’d like to paint her. Paint a child? Why not? Paint whatever you want.
“So! I finally found out,” said Clarisse. “There’s a little game going ’round town, it’s called What Exactly Does Luke Spoon Do? I guess I win.”
“Painting is a hobby of mine,” said Luke. He pushed his cart a few inches forward, thinking he might be able to move on.
“I bet you’re being modest,” said Clarisse, wishing the children weren’t there.
“Hi Alice,” said Felix.”
“She’s our sister now,” said Dawn. “And my mother said we’re not allowed to talk to you, and neither is Alice.”
Alice stood mute.
“Really. Is that what your mother said?” Luke said, addressing Dawn, who recoiled, not used to being addressed directly by an adult who wasn’t a teacher or one of her parents. “And why would your mother say that?”
Clarisse shushed her daughter and tried to relocate herself in the center of his attention.
But Luke stayed focused on the girl. “There’s no need to be afraid of Felix, he’s a wonderful boy,” said Luke, resting his hand on Felix’s shoulder. “But your mother might want to watch out for me.” Then he turned and smiled at Clarisse. “Mrs. McCarthy, you ought to come over one day and watch me paint the walls. It’s interesting, I do it with my tongue.”
Luke wheeled his cart forward, leaving Clarisse in frozen foods, with that mixture of longing and indignity that was typical of their few encounters. Somewhere underneath his rather snide remark she could have sworn he’d just invited her over to his house.
As they made their way to the checkout Felix said to his father, “I never saw you paint with your tongue.” Felix was disappointed that his father told a lie.
FIFTEEN
“WE APPRECIATE YOUR seeing us on a Saturday,” said Jim, reaching over to shake the doctor’s hand.
Doctor Garufee sat down behind his desk and offered Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien a cigarette.
“She doesn’t smoke,” said Jim, taking one.
“So.” The doctor glanced at his chart and turned toward Lil, “Your husband said you’re refusing your medication, is that right? Why don’t you tell me about that.” Lil had forgotten how completely bald the doctor was, and it made her smile.
“This isn’t funny, dear,” he said. “It’s dangerous to stop the medication.”
“No, I know, of course, it’s just … that I feel better,” said Lil.
“You don’t look well, you’re too thin, for one thing,” said Garufee.
“I don’t want to be … drugged anymore,” said Lil.
“Playing with medications is no joke. If you do what I say and stick to the rules, I’m sure we can figure out how to adjust your medication, so it suits you better. There’s nothing unusual about that.”
Jim jumped in clumsily. “Yeah but wait a minute. She’s on the drugs for a reason. We don’t want to go backward here.”
Garufee leaned back in his chair and took a long look at Lil. “Mrs. O’Brien, why are you so sad? Shall I take a guess?” he asked.
“No, please don’t,” said Lil. “I’m feeling better and the medication makes me too tired. I don’t like it; I don’t like it.”
Garufee shook his head. “I wouldn’t put you on a drug that wasn’t good for you. I thought you and I had a good relationship.”
“Of course, I trust you. Yes, I think we do have a good … Listen, doctor,” said Lil. “They’ve taken my child.” She leaned forward in her chair, trying to bypass Jim.
“Who are they? I understand your daughter is only two houses down and the McCarthys are a very responsible family.” Garufee continued carefully, “You do realize this is a result of your behavior. I’m not being unkind, but no one has done this to you. You’ve made certain choices, right? I think it’s fortunate that your neighbors have stepped in.”
“I don’t like the way this is going,” said Lil, having a hard time speaking up. She felt the room tilt.
Jim listened to their conversation, confused. There seemed to be a subtext. What were the certain choices Lil had made?
The doctor rubbed the edge of his mouth with his thumb. “Don’t misunderstand. You’re unwell. You need to settle down and follow the advice of people who are thinking more clearly. If you listen to me, I’ll help you out of this. Why fight? It’s a waste of time, believe me. Everyone is on your side; your husband is on your side; your neighbor is on your side. You need help. And we all want the best for your daughter.”
Lil eyes wandered to a photograph of Dr. Garufee and his family; it stood out among others on his desk. She had noticed it before on other visits. The doctor’s wife was seated on a red velvet chair. Her hands rested on its arms, and her nylon-stockinged legs were thick and crossed at the ankles. Her face was cocked to the side, and she smiled, ever so slightly. The doctor stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, his head, bald as the moon. Beside them, in a wheelchair, was a child, smiling brightly. His arms were bent and crooked, and his legs were encased in silver braces.
Lil closed her eyes. “Yes, okay, I understand.”
“Good,” said the doctor and he scribbled a prescription onto his pad, tore it off and handed it to Jim. “She’ll get through this. We’ll try reducing the dosage. Things are not as bad as they might seem.” As he shook Jim’s hand and led them out the door of his office, he said, “Be kind to each other. Life is hard.”
JIM AND Lil drove out of Farrow’s Corner toward home in icy silence. Lil watched the clouds and treetops speed by, wishing she could open the car door and tumble to the side of the road. When they entered the limits of Hanzloo, she said, “Please drop me at the church.”
“What?” said Jim. “Why?”
“Please, don’t argue, just let me off, and I’ll walk home.”
“Church? All of a sudden you want to go to church? By the way, Alice told me you don’t believe in God. Nice one. Who tells a kid that? You’re dangerous, Lil,” he said.
“Either stop the car at the church or I will open the door while the car is moving,” said Lil, calmly. Jim pulled over by the entrance to the church and banged his hands on the steering wheel.
Lil paused before getting out of the car. “I’m sorry, Jim. I keep saying that, and it doesn’t help, I know. I’ll make my own way home,” she said, opening the door. “And I’m not taking the pills. I don’t tell you what medicine to take.”
“Please. Lil. Let me help you!”
Lil ducked out of the car and shut the door behind her, not looking back. She heard the rumble of the muffler as Jim drove away.
THE OLD church, a cool chamber of lacquered pews and marble floors, was empty. Her footsteps echoed down the side aisle as she slowly approached the altar and the huge cross that hung on the wall behind it. An enormous arched ceiling of dark wooden beams capped the church, and the vague smell of incense hung in the air. Even before she had spiraled out of the orbit of h
er life, Lil rarely went to church on Sunday, preferring to visit in the weekday afternoons, when the church was quiet and dark.
She stopped to admire the reds, blues, yellows, and greens of the stained glass windows, made more vivid by the sunlight streaming in behind them. Her favorite window depicted the Good Samaritan as he stopped to care for a man who’d been left by the side of the road, ignored by passersby. The sight of one man cradling another in his arms and lifting a cup to his lips while others watched always caused her to pause and take a second look. She thought all the figures, bad guys and good guys, looked alike. There was something irresistible about their square hands and feet, their muscular legs, and it was funny, in an appealing way, how they all had perfect noses and big full lips.
Lil passed the Stations of the Cross, stone etchings framed in ornate gold. The familiar sight of Jesus carrying his cross pulled her in. As a kid she had stared at this image, trying to grasp its meaning. Her childhood impression of the crucifixion had never evolved: because you are a sinner, when you grow up, you must carry your instrument of torture on your back and then be nailed to it at death. Lil used to make up sins to tell the priest in the confessional, and then tack on the end of the list, that she had lied.
But now she understood. Now she had a sin, a real whopper, and Dr. Garufee knew all about it. She felt Garufee was an inch away from telling Jim, and maybe the fact that he’d been the one to give her the information was all that had stopped him from breaking the confidence. He hadn’t tried to talk her out of it, either. He’d explained that for him it was a medical choice, not a religious one.
Lil never anticipated how much her decision would haunt her. The trip itself had not been so bad; the early morning Greyhound bus ride from Farrow’s Corner, where she’d sat anonymously with only a handful of other passengers, almost seemed like the start of an adventure. It was a gray December day, two weeks before Christmas. She had the money in the back fold of her purse. The stash she’d been saving for the trip to New York City. Twenty dollars here, ten dollars there.
She leaned her head against the window, and watched the bare, brown hills go by. Her feelings were as frozen as the ground. Where was the guilt?
LIL HAD been a small girl, the last under a pile of nine children. According to the nuns, girls could suffer, like saints; they could hurt themselves for the sake of others, and if they were lucky some of them were blest with the ability to absorb the pain of everyone around them. A little girl’s greatness lay in her ability to be last in line, to be invisible.
She wasn’t afraid, even after hearing Dr. Garufee’s warnings of the dangers of aborting, even after sneakily looking it up in the library. Awful things could happen. You could die. You could bleed to death on the table. But what was worse than being buried under another pile of children? With Alice she felt there was a chance that they might get out of Hanzloo, but once the babies started to form a line inside her, she knew she’d never get free.
Lil lied to Jim about going to visit her sister in New Jersey, and as if possessed by an inner demon she’d never met before, she rode the bus with a cool resolve.
The Philadelphia Greyhound station was alive with commuters, travelers with suitcases—all strangers—and she was a stranger, too. She stood in line at the taxi stand. No one cared who she was or where she was going. The cab ride was tense; the driver smoked a cigar, and barely acknowledged that she’d gotten in the cab. Lil worried that he’d take her to the wrong address. He dropped her at a small five-story building in a remote part of town.
She pushed the tiny button: 4H, and a loud buzz startled her. She opened the door and took the tiny elevator up.
The doctor’s door was ajar, and once inside, Lil saw the room looked more like a small apartment than an office. It was clean, but shabby. A black couch with flattened cushions sat against the wall, and grey carpeting covered the floor. Nothing hung on the cream-colored walls. A young man sat behind a small desk, wearing large glasses wound in the middle with tape, and his face was dotted with acne. He extended his hand warmly, as if he’d been expecting her for quite some time. “Hello Lilian, I’m Carl.”
It was only when Dr. Ella came out of a back room that fear crept up her arms. The doctor, her face loose with the sagging skin of middle age, had gray-streaked hair—wound tightly in a low bun. She wore a white coat, like any other doctor might, and she extended her hand for a shake. Perhaps sensing Lil’s nervousness, Dr. Ella asked about her trip. There were no other personal questions; the word husband never came up.
Doctor Ella called it the procedure room, and she led them in. There, Lil went through the doctor’s checklist of medical history attentively, nodding yes or no, and undressed quickly when left with a scanty robe.
In one brief moment, Lil panicked, and could not catch her breath. The doctor pulled away from the cold silver table and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to stop.”
“I’m sorry. I’m nervous.”
“You’re lucky you came to me,” said the doctor. “I know what I’m doing.”
“If I die—”
“You won’t,” said the doctor, emphatically.
“Okay. Yes. Do it.”
“All right,” said the doctor, with a quick, decisive nod. “You’re going to fall asleep,” she said. For a moment she laid her hand on Lil’s forearm, and then she poured liquid onto a palm-sized square of gauze and placed it over Lil’s mouth.
“So easy,” Lil whispered, as she drifted off.
Lil O’Brien, a good Catholic girl, who had lived a life of little white lies and venial sins, committed her gigantic mortal sin in a deep, deep sleep. When she woke up and looked around, she knew exactly where she was, and the young man with the broken glasses said, “Welcome back.” He’d been sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, reading a paperback. No complications, no lightning strikes from heaven. Just some cramps in the abdomen and some deep dreaming on the night ride home.
Back in Hanzloo, Jim never suspected, and no one cared. “I know what I’m doing. Lucky you came to me,” were the words she remembered from the doctor. But with the first warm days of spring, shame curled up inside her where the baby once grew.
NOW, SLIDING into one of the pews not far from the altar, neither genuflecting nor making the sign of the cross, Lil sat staring at the crucified statue above the altar, that was nailed—nailed!—to the wooden cross. She kneaded the palms of her hands with her thumbs and imagined what kind of unbearable pain a nail would cause, and who would even think to thrust a nail into a person’s hand?
She felt that if someone nailed her to a cross, and hung her in her underwear, in the middle of Hanzloo, it wouldn’t take three days and nights for her to expire. She would die immediately. Surely Clarisse McCarthy would be there to witness it, Jim, and all the others, too. Would the children be allowed? Would Alice stand stone-faced, holding on to Clarisse’s hand?
From high up, behind the shadows of the confessionals, a large black crow hiding in the rafters of the church swooped across the ceiling and landed on the tilted head of the Jesus that hung on the cross above the altar. Lil called out to the bird, and her words rang throughout the church, “Shame!” Her voice came back at her. She cried again, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
The bird took flight again and disappeared into the upper beams in the church ceiling, the flutter of its wings resounding.
From the small alcove where the red vigil candles flickered peacefully, Sister Annunciata stomped across the dimly lit church.
Lil stood up abruptly.
“Hold on!” said the sister, and she hobbled down the center aisle, her heavy rosary beads rattling as she cut across a middle pew to block Lil’s exit. The old nun leaned, out of breath, with her hand on the pew. “Shame,” she said, considering the word. “Oh, there’s a heavy load” The sister’s voice was low and gruff.
The women spoke in urgent whispers.
“Sister, I’m … I,” said Lil, flustered.
“Of course,” said Lil, her head throbbing. The last thing she wanted was a lecture.
The sister tried to settle her breath; she sat down with her legs wide apart underneath her heavy skirts, placing her palms on her knees for support. To Lil, her face, with its frayed eye patch, large nose, and hanging jowls, seemed attached to her habit like a Halloween mask that could be peeled right off. “Sister, are you okay?”
“I’m better than you are,” she said. “At least I’m not screaming at a crow.”
“I thought I was alone,” said Lil.
Sister Annunciata gave a hoarse laugh. “I must admit, though, you really got me. I thought I’d been visited by one of these figurines,” she said, pointing around at the statues in the church. “I had a real moment there. I said to myself, ‘One of these things has finally come to life.’” Sister Annunciata chuckled as she reached into her deep pocket, pulled out her handkerchief, and gave her nose a honk.
Lil had never had a conversation with Sister A. before. She’d only observed her from a distance at school functions, in church, and at the playground.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t have screamed in church,” said Lil, picking up her purse. “I’ll be on my way, as long as you are okay.”
“I assume you came here for a reason.”
“It’s not what you think,” said Lil.
“I don’t think anything,” said the sister. “What should I think? I’m curious, why are you calling out ‘shame, shame, shame’ in the church in the middle of a Saturday afternoon?”