Agatha of Little Neon

by Claire Luchette

  * * *

  When everyone was at the table, Father Steve said how happy the church was to welcome all of us to Woonsocket. He praised Abbess Paracleta’s work: she’d created a safe haven for people who needed a place to go.

  “See, goodness is somewhere inside these people—these addicts and felons,” Deacon Greg said. “It’s somewhere deep down. Lost under all the wreckage.” It made me sad, the word “wreckage.” As if they were totaled cars. “Your job is to coax the goodness out. By caring for them. Praying with them, giving them hope and faith.”

  “Yes,” Frances said, eyes bright. “I want to extract that goodness.”

  “Sounds painful, when you put it like that,” Mary Lucille said. “Like a tooth.”

  “I want to make God cool again,” Father Steve said. I didn’t think God had any interest in being cool, but this I did not say. Father Steve thought we ought to organize a Bible study group. “But a fun one,” he said. “Here at Little Neon. Bring in members of the community, help the Neon residents network, socialize, get to know people.” He seemed anxious that we agree.

  We’d never tried to make the Bible fun. Fun!

  Frances said, “Okay,” and the rest of us nodded.

  “There’ll be ups and downs, here at Little Neon,” Deacon Greg said. “One day you’ll feel like a failure, the next you’ll feel like a million bucks. I bet that’s not so different from your work in Lackawanna. With the babies.”

  There was a pause. “Mostly we just felt tired,” Therese said.

  “I bet,” Father Steve said.

  The men exchanged a look.

  “Well,” the principal said. “You came just in time for the loveliest part of the year here in Woonsocket. The summer is glorious. But even as we’re enjoying it, we—the father and the deacon and I—we’re looking ahead to autumn, and it seems we’re in a bit of a jam.”

  We waited.

  “A job’s opened up at the high school,” he said. “Teaching math. Sophomore geometry. One of our teachers quit on the last day of school. He decided to move to Canada, totally out of the blue. And now we have to find someone to take over his class.” He took a sip of tea. “So we were thinking—wow, huh, here we have these bright sisters, new to town, full of energy, lots of enthusiasm, eager to help out, and they love young people—maybe—”

  “Maybe one of you could do it,” Father Steve said. He looked at each of us.

  We were quiet for a moment. Then Mary Lucille said, “Sure.”

  Therese said, “You’re terrible at math, Mary Lucille.”

  “I wasn’t saying I would do it.”

  “You can take some time to think it over, talk to each other,” Deacon Greg said. “You don’t have to answer now.”

  The principal said, “But. We’d appreciate if you could let us know soon, since—”

  “What about Agatha?” Frances said, and everyone looked at me. My face flamed. I wanted to vanish.

  “What about me?” I said. I hadn’t said anything in a while, and my voice came as a whisper.

  “Nah,” Therese said. “No way. Agatha’s too quiet. Those kids will eat her alive.”

  “She’s the smartest of us, though,” Mary Lucille said.

  “Yeah,” Frances said. “I mean, I can’t do it. It’s clear I’m needed here at Little Neon. And Therese is too impatient. And Mary Lucille’s bad at math, like she said. But Agatha—you’re bright and kind and remember when you drew the plans for that bird feeder? You have an eye for shapes and things.”

  I looked at my lap. For years, I’d asked God for faith in myself; my whole life, I’d prayed for a way with words. I’d always wanted to become the kind of person who said the right things, whom other people looked to for answers.

  “Like we said, you can take some time to decide, if you need it,” the principal said. “But we’d love to have you.” Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. Maybe it would give me a new way to feel useful.

  Mary Lucille touched my arm. She said, “You’d be a great teacher.” And despite myself, I smiled.

  My smile must have looked like acquiescence, because Frances said, “So it’s decided, then. Yeah?”

  * * *

  Deacon Greg asked if we’d like to see the parish, the church, and the gift shop. I followed the black veils of my sisters. On the sidewalk, the sun was hot and high, shining off the deacon’s bald spot. The humidity was so thick we could have grabbed at it and held on. We had to blink to adjust to the dim light inside the church. The walls of St. Gertrude’s were simple and modern, the high ceiling planked with pine. No scenes of heaven above us. The pews arced around the altar, like seats at an arena.

  The men made a great show of demonstrating how to dim the altar lights, how to open the windows, how to slip the holy-water font from the wall so it could be cleaned and refilled. We took turns in front of the alarm system panel, practicing the way to activate and deactivate, and I got it on the first try. To no one in particular, Mary Lucille said, “See, I told you Agatha was the smartest.”

  15.

  I started seeing shades of Little Neon green everywhere I went. Construction workers’ vests, the Granny Smiths stacked up in the produce aisle, a pair of tennis balls stuck on the back legs of an old man’s walker. On the sidewalk, a boy’s sneakers lit up and glowed Little Neon green with each step.

  There were other homes like ours in Woonsocket—halfway houses and sober homes—but they were brick, or painted shades of beige. We’d driven past them. They had nothing to do with the church; they were funded by federal agencies and state programs. One was a triple-decker with a porch for sitting. Another was a low bungalow with windows broad enough you could open them and drive a car straight through. They were all so big and sturdy-looking, these houses. They had neat lawns and square hedges, and asters and crocuses in their gardens, and their roofs weren’t missing any shingles, and they could house ten times the number of people we could.

  “They must have so much room,” Therese said once, when we were driving past the three-story house.

  “But it’s not bright green,” Frances said. “It’ll never be bright green.”

  * * *

  Mary Lucille got it in her head that what everyone in Little Neon needed was a creative outlet. “Watercolors,” she said, “or drawing, maybe. A way for people to express themselves visually.” Therese thought basketball, but she took a house poll and the results were overwhelmingly in Mary Lucille’s favor.

  Each Friday, she said, we’d have scheduled art activities, to help people try to “get in touch with the artist within.” She acquired a bunch of pencils and scrap paper: we would start with figure drawing. It was obligatory, she said, unless you had to work. And no one had to work.

  The first week, she asked Therese to model. “You can wear your clothes. You don’t have to be naked,” Mary Lucille said.

  Therese said, “Duh.” She hoisted herself onto the kitchen counter and came to standing, her head an inch from the ceiling. She turned her back to us, a hand on one hip, then swiveled her head around to look past us, a vacant look in her eyes.

  Everyone tried to replicate what it was they saw in front of them. I didn’t know how it happened, how you could look at something real and make the shape of it show up in pencil. The image was so much more beautiful in my mind than it was on the paper. Something got messed up in the translation. I made her arms look like corn chips.

  None of us was very good, except Baby. Baby had sketched Therese’s likeness with care: the ratio of her long limbs to the rest of her, the pinched look of her face. He’d made her look human, 3-D. Baby’s drawing was good; everybody thought so.

  He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t like the idea of being called good. “It’s not,” he said. “Shut up.” But I also saw him smile.

  16.

  The principal brought me a textbook, along with the former teacher’s lesson plans, handouts, quizzes, projector slides of Cartesian planes.

  Every shape, e
very theorem looked foreign, to the point that I convinced myself this was some fancy modern geometry, and whatever I’d learned as a teenager had been made obsolete by now. When I thought back to high school geometry, I pictured my white-haired teacher and his blunt mustache. He was peculiar and mean. If you did well on a test, he’d say, “You’re on the plane.” If you did really well: “You’re in first class.” If you failed: “You missed the plane. The plane took off and you weren’t on board; you didn’t make it through security,” or, “You don’t even have a ticket.” He’d say it right there, in front of everyone.

  I tried to remember whatever it was the man had said about geometry, but I remembered only his candor, and his mustache, and that the textbook was many inches thick. I hated to carry it to class. I was going through a phase then, always moody and thin-skinned, given to pit stains and crying jags. I assigned significance to the smallest things: my handwriting, the way my sandwich was sliced. But I must not have assigned much significance to geometry, because I couldn’t remember a single page of that textbook, except for one sentence: “All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.”

  17.

  The heat that summer was brutal. We asked Abbess Paracleta for a window air-conditioning unit, and she told us she did not believe in air-conditioning. She believed in box fans propped in open windows. She believed in Popsicles, cold showers, cross breezes, ice packs on the neck. She believed in getting through it.

  Therese told Baby he was lucky: he got to spend his days in the freezer at the ice factory, doing inventory and quality control, and shrink-wrapping whole blocks of ice, while the rest of us were cooked alive. He said it wasn’t so great, but it did make him glad for hot evenings. Each week he brought home whole pallets of defective ice for the freezer.

  “Defective?” Mary Lucille said.

  “There’s nothing nasty about it,” he said. “It’s just some parts turned yellow.”

  In the attic the air was thick as buttercream. We tried not to complain. Panting one Tuesday night, Frances—red-faced and damp around the collar—went downstairs for a glass of water and came back with a broad bowl of ice. In the kitchen, Baby had suggested she prop it in front of the fan. When she did, we got a cool breeze, enough to help us fall asleep. At dawn we found that the melted ice had been dumped and replaced in the night. “I didn’t do anything,” Baby said, when we asked.

  * * *

  Days when they didn’t have to work, the Neons liked to sit in lawn chairs in the backyard and let the sprinkler strike their legs. I would look out the window and see them sitting side by side. The sprinkler was the kind that whirled around, and the water wasn’t sprinkled so much as shot. It came in harsh, violent bursts and made mud of the lawn. But if the water hurt when it hit their shins, the Neons didn’t seem to mind. Most afternoons, they fell asleep in their chairs while the sprinkler chopped on. They’d come in hours later, one at a time or all at once, pink from the sun, their shorts clinging to their legs, and drip water throughout the house.

  Lawnmower Jill cut the grass every other Saturday, coasting up and down the length of the lawn in her Bronco. On those days, no one was allowed to sit in the yard so long as her engine was running. She was fastidious about cutting precise stripes of grass, and I liked to watch from inside as she charged into the horizon, bits of grass flitting in the air like confetti.

  * * *

  In Woonsocket, Mary Lucille claimed she knew how to cook. She announced this early on, with confidence. She said she was a better cook than any of us. She said she’d learned from watching Mother Roberta. Mother Roberta would make meatballs the size of mangoes. Chicken cacciatore. Pot roast so tender that my mouth waters even now, thinking of it.

  Mary Lucille told us she would take on all the cooking in Little Neon.

  “Cooking dinner for nine adults, night after night,” Therese said. “Are you sure? We can take turns.”

  “Yes,” Mary Lucille said, “I’m sure.”

  Hot summer evenings, she prepared food that didn’t need to be baked or boiled or fried. Fruit salad. Tuna salad sandwiches. Strange things, too: Mashed beans on bread. Sliced turkey on spinach. For Tim Gary, she made yogurt smoothies in various shades of brown. “I wish I got the liquid option,” Horse said one night, when Mary Lucille served us walnut tacos: chopped walnuts on tortillas, topped with raw onions and iceberg lettuce and shredded cheese. “Who ever heard of a walnut taco.”

  Mary Lucille said nothing. We held hands and prayed, and I watched Mary Lucille bring her tortilla mess to her mouth and take a bite. She made a show of chewing and swallowing and saying, “Oh wow, that turned out good.” But I saw in her face that she was faking it.

  I pretended everything was its own dish: a five-course meal. The raw onion course was awful, but I got it over with first. Last was cheese, the dessert, and after the cheese, I sat for some time without speaking, not because I had nothing to say, but because I was overcome with the sense that our work in Woonsocket would be more difficult than I had imagined. I don’t know why it should have been the walnut tacos that revealed this to me, but I guess it was as good a moment as any.

  We’d come to Woonsocket to care for these people, but we had no idea what that meant. We thought we had things to give them, prayer and compassion and mercy and home-cooked meals, but none of this seemed like enough.

  It’s truer to say that we—or, I, at least—had come because we’d been told it was God’s plan, which a lot of the time has nothing to do with what you had in mind for yourself.

  18.

  It wasn’t long after the walnut tacos that I found a pair of stiff-heeled roller skates in the garage. They were brown leather, and a size too small for me, but I tried them on anyhow. Tight in the toe, but they laced up fine.

  I had this recurring image in my head of Mother Roberta at the grocery store, pushing a cart and lifting her feet so she took off down the aisle, the chrome of the cart gleaming under the lights. “Yeehaw!” she yelled, making us all laugh. It wasn’t the same thing, I knew, but still I was excited about the skates in a way that felt illicit. I hadn’t roller-skated since a grade school birthday. I hadn’t done something for the fun of it in maybe forever.

  I waited until after evening prayer, when everyone else was in bed, and then I snuck to the garage in my nightgown.

  I never told the others. It was the first decision I made on my own in Woonsocket, the first thing I kept to myself. No permission, no approval, no company. No one to sidetrack me from what I wanted, which was to soar across the cement. It would be easy, I thought, like walking, but more fun.

  Well: it was hard to lift one foot and then the other. There I was, graceless and inept, doubled over but determined. For stability I groped the walls, but I still fell down hard. Blood bloomed on my hands and knees, and sweat collected around my collar and pits, but I kept on, up and up and up again, from one end of the garage to the other, until my mouth was dry with the work of it. When I heard footsteps, I froze, and when there were no more footsteps I took myself across the cement again.

  After a while, when I was too tuckered out to try again, I went inside and drank cold water and iced my knees in the kitchen.

  Tim Gary came down from his room to find me pressing Baby’s defective ice cubes to my knees, the skates abandoned on the linoleum.

  “Hi,” he said. He gestured at the skates. “Where’d you find those?”

  I reddened. I said, “The garage.”

  “You skinned your knees.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The ice cubes were melting down my shins. “I’m sorry—I hope I didn’t wake you?”

  He shook his head. “I was awake. Came down for a glass of milk.”

  I told him to sit. I could pour him milk. I chucked what was left of the ice cubes in the sink. In search of a tall glass, I dripped pink water all over the kitchen floor, opening and closing every cupboard door. Little Neon’s kitchen was still foreign to me. I picked all the wrong cupboards.


  When the milk was poured, I turned to Tim Gary. Where could I find a straw?

  He had just the one straw, he said, the one he had used at dinner, and he drank from it at every meal. His ex-wife had brought it with a milkshake after his jaw operation. A time, I could see, when her patience was broader and her love less finite.

  I looked in the trash and found the straw; one of us had tossed it. It was still in good shape, not crushed or kinked. I rinsed it in hot water and slipped it into the thick white milk, and I watched Tim Gary drink, his soft throat rippling as the milk disappeared.

  He looked up and said, “I can teach you to skate.” He used to be a hockey player, he said. Roller skates were no big deal. He was sure it wouldn’t take me long to get the hang of it.

  I said, as a reflex, “Oh, that’s so nice, thank you, but I can learn on my own, really; I’m so bad; you don’t have to; don’t worry.”

  And he said, “Why would I be worried?”

  * * *

  We met in the garage the next night, after curfew, after dark. I made him promise not to tell anyone. My sisters were in bed; we’d said our nightly rosary. Lawnmower Jill, Baby, Pete, and Horse were in the front room playing gin rummy, but no one seemed to notice us slip out the kitchen door.

  “I stole Pete’s construction gear,” Tim Gary said, and knelt to strap pads to my knees. He was all business. “So you don’t get all beat up.” I lifted the hem of my nightgown an inch so he could bring the Velcro around. “Okay,” he said, when he was done. “Show me what you got.”

  I launched myself from where I was standing, and a second later I was flat on the ground.