Agatha of Little Neon

by Claire Luchette

  Baby raised a hand. “Did the flood actually happen? Like, historically speaking?”

  “No,” Therese said. “I mean, maybe. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is more the meaning of the flood. Let’s turn to it.” She flipped open her Bible. “Okay. Genesis, chapter six, where God decides to punish all of humanity. Who wants to volunteer to read?”

  After a painful moment of nothing, Tim Gary raised his hand. He read for a long time: about the flood and the ark and the pairs of animals and the rainbow at the end of it all. When he finished, Frances asked, “So what’s this story all about?”

  Pete said, “Mercy.”

  Tim Gary said, “Hope.”

  Baby said, “How God hates gay people.”

  I drew my breath.

  Frances’s eyes went wide.

  Therese’s got very small. “What?”

  “None of the animals on the ark are gay,” Baby said.

  It was quiet. Then Mary Lucille said, “Well, I suppose that’s true.”

  “Right. So the gay animals, they all drowned.”

  “I don’t think animals can be gay,” Pete said. “I think it’s just a human thing.”

  “No, there’s gay penguins,” Tim Gary said, “Roy and Silo.”

  “Dolphins are gay,” the twin on the left said.

  Tim Gary looked hurt.

  “Hey,” I said to the twin. “Be nice.” I sounded shrill.

  Frances flicked the lights off and on and off and on again. “Everyone! Quiet please. Baby, you raise an interesting point. But—and while I don’t think there are any bad ideas—I think maybe that’s not the heart of the story. It’s God’s grace, right? His power along with His love.”

  Baby crossed his arms. “Can’t there be more than one right answer?”

  My sisters looked at each other. “No,” said Therese.

  * * *

  When class was over, and it was just the four of us in the kitchen, I suggested that maybe they didn’t need to start with the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament is a very vengeful God, I said, and those stories might scare people off. I knew they wanted to get through the whole Bible, but maybe they didn’t have to do it in order. Why not start with a Gospel?

  “Yeah,” Frances said. She seemed surprised by my helpfulness. “That’s not a bad idea, actually.”

  Nine people felt like plenty to me, but my sisters were disappointed with the turnout. Frances said, “I realized: it’s two-dollar Tuesday at the second-run cinema. That’s the problem. Should we switch to Wednesdays?”

  “Wednesday’s karaoke night at Ick’s,” Mary Lucille said. “And Tim Gary works late.” So we switched to Thursdays. The four of them spent the week distributing revised flyers with updated information.

  On Thursday, I watched from the window as the twins stepped out of the silver car. They started to walk up the driveway, but when the silver car had driven out of sight, they turned and ran down the street in the opposite direction.

  37.

  From my classroom window I could watch Nadia smoke in the faculty parking lot. During her free period, she leaned against her red Jeep and lit up. On her way back inside, she tossed her butts in the dumpster, and when she saw me looking, she smiled and waved like the queen.

  Nadia told me she didn’t bother giving out detentions. She didn’t care about any of the rules. “I can’t even pretend to give a damn about whether or not my student’s skirt hits her knee,” she said. “Or if she wears glitter. Or if she has blue hair. What does that have to do with anything?”

  I nodded. Skirts and glitter and blue hair didn’t bother me, either. It seemed weird to me that anyone would look at their student closely enough to notice glitter on her eyelids, or that her skirt was an inch too short.

  I was surprised by how easy it was for me to disregard the rules. I had always felt reverence for Mother Roberta’s rules, and before I became a teacher—when I was younger, more ignorant of my own agency, more willing to cling to a particular way of life—I relied on commandments and codes of conduct for a sense of what was right. But Principal Ruby’s rules were tedious, a nuisance, vaguely insulting. It was easier for me to act as if they didn’t exist than to try and enforce them.

  * * *

  The students surprised me with their appetites. In the lunchroom they were greedy. Fries by the fistful, hunks of green Jell-O. Sub sandwiches stuffed with meat and cheese. Cookies in triplicate. They ate everywhere: they snuck licorice in the library and caramels on the mezzanine. They thought they were being sneaky, but I saw them try for secrecy, their jaws moving with restraint. They slipped candy wrappers into skirt pockets and between the pages of books.

  And then in early October, a girl with braids nearly died after she tripped and choked on a Tootsie Roll. The Spanish teacher administered the Heimlich; the principal called the girl’s parents. He also called an emergency faculty meeting after school. We met in the conference room on the ground floor, dozens of us in chairs facing the front of the room, where Mr. Ruby stood in front of a projector screen.

  I sat next to Nadia. When everyone was in their seats, Mr. Ruby dimmed the lights and clicked through a slideshow of things that might go wrong in a school. Between each slide, he’d included a sound effect: a thwack, thrum, or boing.

  The slideshow was extensive. He read the words on each slide: choking, seizure, broken limb, heart attack, stroke, heat stroke, fainting and loss of consciousness, outbreak of infectious disease, panic attack, fire, gas leak, power outage, hurricane, flash flood, earthquake, mudslide, bomb threat, possession of firearms, active shooting, mass shooting, terrorist attack, missing student, fist fight, sexual assault, sexual harassment, racial slurs, racial discrimination, evidence of domestic abuse, evidence of neglect, evidence of self-harm, cyber bullying, verbal bullying, death.

  Mr. Ruby told us the most important thing was to remain calm in the event of an emergency. He said, “It’s important to be oblivious of your surroundings.”

  Nadia burst out laughing, which made me laugh, too.

  “Ladies,” Mr. Ruby said. One of his eyes looked at me, and the other went to the side. “What’s so funny?”

  Nadia said, “I think you meant to say ‘observant.’ Or maybe you meant, ‘It’s important not to be oblivious.’”

  “No, I know what I meant,” he said, firm. “You have to be oblivious.”

  Mr. Ruby’s assistant, a man who wore a different Hawaiian shirt each day, stood and whispered in the man’s ear.

  “Right,” the principal said to the group. He seemed annoyed. “Like I said, it’s important to pay attention to your surroundings. And remain calm.”

  Nadia gave me a smirk.

  The principal then said if we had any concerns for the well-being of the students and staff, we could voice them now.

  “The hallways and stairways,” Nadia said. “They get so congested. It’s not safe. We need to establish a better traffic pattern.”

  The principal’s good eye seemed to stare right through her.

  “But I’ve been thinking about this problem, and I might have an idea. Maybe one stairway could be for walking upstairs, and the other for walking downstairs?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the principal said. “That’s not in God’s plan for us right now.” He asked if anyone else had concerns.

  I was emboldened by Nadia. I raised a hand. “Also, there’s too much waste,” I said, heart hammering. I asked why the school did not recycle. Plastic and aluminum were sent off in the same bins as bread crusts and orange peels, the soft stuff that easily broke down in landfills. But plastic took centuries to biodegrade. Plastic needed to be turned into something else. “Think of the impact,” I said. “Think of the whales, the polar bears. Think of the earth.”

  The principal avoided my gaze. He said city fees for recycling pickup were exorbitant, an expense the school could ill afford.

  Mr. Claude, who taught French, raised a hand. “The eating in the hal
lways. It’s not safe.”

  The principal nodded. “Yes. You make a good point. That is how the girl choked. I’ll issue an announcement of some sort. At once.”

  The next day, the principal followed through and delivered the promised edict. Over the intercom, after reciting the daily prayer of servitude, he announced: “I’m issuing a new rule, for your safety. You shall not eat in the hallways. You shall not walk and chew gum.”

  38.

  In health class, the students learned about sex. The health teacher, Mr. Hoover, was an old man with a goatee and enormous bifocals. He liked to wear a certain sweatshirt with “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” and a full-color picture of the Nativity scene. Even in October, he wore it. The sex-ed unit was scheduled after nutrition and before first aid.

  The lectures centered around anatomy. The relative positions of parts and tubes. According to their textbooks—sheepish, helpless, I snuck a look when one was forgotten in my room—sex was a diagram that could be memorized. Reproduction wasn’t so different from an equation or a graph.

  I knew how the students perceived me: the same as any other body lost in a habit. Prudish, callow, pure. The nuns they knew from storybooks and movies were wicked, frustrated, sexually repressed; they slapped students with rulers and had bad breath. The students pitied me, I was sure. But I remembered what it was like to be young, flush with desires I wasn’t prepared to navigate. Of course I remembered.

  All it took was the smell of strawberry shampoo or the give of a taffy wrapped in wax paper, and I would be privately transported to times in my youth when I’d allowed myself a little idolatry. Back then I had started to suspect it was girls I liked, since it was girls I thought of all day, in flashes: the way a spaghetti strap slipped from a girl’s shoulder, or the pink of her tongue when she put a breath mint there. But I kept this to myself. I was old enough to know what a sin was. I could tell what things I wasn’t supposed to think.

  I know this sounds like repression. Clichéd and craven and crude. But it didn’t seem like that at the time. It felt like discipline. I thought I’d overcome something, in disclaiming myself. It looked, to me, like choosing the better life.

  39.

  Anywhere I walked in Woonsocket, I looked for Horse and Lawnmower Jill. Every parka, every purple windbreaker, every loud laugh and scrawny woman made me think of them. One afternoon I heard the hum of a lawnmower from blocks away, and I followed the noise until I turned a corner and peeked past a hedge and could see, at last, what was making the whir. It wasn’t a Bronco. It was some other massive mower. I turned, disappointed, and walked back the other way.

  We prayed for Horse and Lawnmower Jill each night, sometimes aloud and sometimes in silence. I preferred the nights I could hear my sisters speak. I didn’t like to wonder what they prayed for, or who they mentioned first, or whether they were more appellate or grateful or contrite.

  After Lawnmower Jill and Horse left, we prayed a lot of silent, private prayers. One of the bad nights, I couldn’t find anything to say to God except how sorry I was that we’d failed. I said it over and over, then crossed myself and opened my eyes. I recognized the furniture, the floorboards, the bare light bulb hanging from the rafters. There were my sisters’ faces, still somber in prayer. When I closed my eyes again, I saw nothing but dark and more dark.

  On good days, it wasn’t hard to come up with a list of things I wanted for them. I wanted them to stand up straight and zip their coats and drink lots of water and show up on time and go to sleep without dread and find meaningful marginalia in used paperbacks. But even on those days, when the asks were easy and filled with purpose, I always preferred praying to having prayed. When the prayer was over I felt vacant, helpless to do anything but stand and walk across the room.

  40.

  And then there was someone new: Eileen. Therese had found her application and given it to Abbess Paracleta to approve. She was still trying to read through the rest. No one wanted to help her sort through all the paper and decide, so whoever she chose was fine by us.

  Eileen, Therese told us, had been working at the all-night strip club, the one with a breakfast buffet, until she lost her job because she came to work too high to dance. She’d grown up in Milton, Massachusetts—“That’s where George Bush the elder was born,” Mary Lucille said—and her parents sent her to a fancy boarding school, but she was kicked out after two years. Now she was twenty-four and working at the Gap and trying to keep away from meth. She’d written in her application that she hoped living in Little Neon would help bring her closer to God.

  “That’s perfect!” Frances said. “That’s exactly what we want!”

  * * *

  On a Tuesday, Abbess Paracleta brought her in the flatbed truck. Eileen was tall but fragile-looking, a hoop in her nose, blond hair pushed up in a mohawk. “I just cut it,” she said, and Mary Lucille told her it was lovely.

  The abbess took her for a tour. “That’s the corduroy couch. No napping on the couch, and no TV after ten,” I heard her say.

  “I don’t nap,” Eileen said. “And I don’t ever watch TV.”

  “Well,” the abbess said. “In case you start.”

  * * *

  At dinner everyone was stiff, still, polite, until the abbess said, while cutting into her chicken, “Eileen, I can set you up with GED classes, if you like.”

  “What does ‘GED’ stand for, again?” Eileen asked.

  “‘Get Educated, Dummy,’” Baby said.

  “Hey,” Frances said. “That’s not very nice. Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Baby said. Eileen shrugged it off.

  “It stands for ‘General Educational Development,’” the abbess said. “It’s four tests that assess high school–level know-how.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” Eileen said. She smiled. “Thanks.”

  “I know you said no last time, Baby, but it’s never too late. I could sign you up, too, if you’d like,” the abbess said.

  “Nah. Only GED I want is a Good Edible Dinner,” Baby said, and the abbess surprised us with a laugh.

  41.

  “Okay, it all started with a huge box,” Mary Lucille told me. I was on the corduroy couch, grading homework, and the three of them came and sat next to me, looking to tell me about the massive cardboard box that was deposited on Little Neon’s front steps while I was at school. “We were a little afraid of it, at first. It was enormous. Therese lugged it into the kitchen and opened it with a scissors. And inside,” Mary Lucille said, watching my face for a reaction, “inside was a brand-new juicer.” When I didn’t say anything, she said again, “A juicer.”

  “State-of-the-art,” Frances said. “Top-of-the-line. It was a marvel.”

  “Wow,” I said. I pictured one of those giant, shiny machines that can make liquid of a hard beet or pear. A dense drum of stainless steel, and a clear dome up top where the fruit went in. “Who was it for?”

  “We thought maybe Tim Gary had saved up and ordered it,” Frances said, “dependent as he is on liquid meals. But we checked the label and the receipt inside and saw it was delivered by mistake.” The box was addressed to a Mrs. Scrimshaw, who lived not with us at 30 Hamlet, but at 30 Hamburger, on the other side of Woonsocket.

  “We also saw”—Mary Lucille lowered her voice—“that the juicer had cost four hundred dollars before tax and shipping.”

  “Four hundred dollars!” Therese said. “Four hundred dollars would buy a lawn mower I didn’t have to push.”

  “Or an AC unit,” Mary Lucille said, reveling in the thought. “Two AC units!”

  “Or we could buy everyone new shoes,” I said. “Baby’s sneakers are held together with tape.”

  “Just imagine the Bible study flyers we could print on a four-hundred-dollar printer—glossy, bright, full color,” Frances added. “Or, with four hundred dollars, we could serve pizza.” She did some math in her head. “Good pizza for nine months, or bad pizza for a year.”

  “Oh, it turns your i
nsides sick when you let yourself want things,” Mary Lucille said.

  Therese jumped in. “Anyway. The story. So we slapped new tape on the box and went to deliver the juicer.” They were in the mood for fresh air, so they walked single file down the pavement in their habits and their lace-up shoes. It was cool out, but they were still sweating in their habits. They took turns carrying the box, and the cardboard softened in their fingers as they went.

  They passed the trailer park and the public housing and the loan shark and the methadone clinic and the thrift. Mrs. Scrimshaw lived in a gated community just south of the private high school, where the streets were smooth and the grass perky. They hadn’t seen this part of Woonsocket before. At the gate a mustached guard saluted them, safe in his little booth, and they nodded back. They walked until they found house number 30.

  “It was a split-level, more brick than window,” Mary Lucille said. “Gorgeous petunias out front. Mrs. Scrimshaw answered the door in a blue dress, creased in the lap.”

  “She looked us up and down,” Frances said, “like she was appraising. And then she blew on her fingernails. The polish was still wet.”

  “And she goes, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not interested,’ and then she closed the door right in our faces,” Mary Lucille said. “We didn’t even have a chance to explain why we were there. And so Frances knocked again and she kept knocking until Mrs. Scrimshaw finally opened the door and Therese told her they had a package for her.”

  Mrs. Scrimshaw was skeptical, but she read the box’s label. “Oh,” she said, and thanked them. She hoped they hadn’t traveled far. She stood for a moment in hesitation, and then asked, “Do you want to come in?”

  They did. They elbowed each other in their rush for the cool conditioned air. Then they stood and took in the splendor.