I look down at the flyer and see his name in a fancy font: Father Robert Dugan.
“It started when I was fifteen.”
“Oh, yeah?” I give up a fake-casual cough and cover my mouth with my hand; I stick my thumb in my mouth and scrape the Communion wafer from the roof of it. I put the remains in my coat pocket.
“I mean, it’s not like I was five.”
I nod. I look down, as if in perpetual thrall to the grooved plastic lines in the car mats, the embedded pebbles and dirt clods. “Well. Five would be bad.”
Bradley digs in his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, God no! Please! Please.” I make a whirling tornado of my hand. “Please go ahead.”
Bradley unwinds his window a few inches. I crank the heat higher to compensate. He makes quick work of his rolling papers and weed. He fires up with his Zippo lighter and inhales the deepest breath, a “seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean” breath that makes the joint sizzle and burn bright orange.
Bradley’s face is compressed agony as he holds in the smoke; his expression makes the grimace of the crucified Jesus look blasé: Damn, I forgot my coupons. When I see a tear on the plane of his cheek, I look down at my hands.
My mother’s favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye, which I felt was such an obvious favorite book, a clichéd captain-of-the-football-team favorite book. She would often channel Holden Caulfield when she felt happy, saying: “There are a lot of nice things in the world. I mean, a lot of nice things. We’re all such morons to get sidetracked.” But both J. D. Salinger and my mother may have been wrong about this.
Bradley finally shudders and coughs out the smoke. He takes a violent swipe at his face, clearing the tears.
“I thought I would think about him less when I was away from him. All last summer I had the thought that, in the fall, when I was away at college, I would love him less, I would think about him less.” Bradley gives a devil-may-care shrug, a cocky smile. “But, not so much.” He takes another long drag. In the choked silence I stare up at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, at the stained-glass windows that are covered with the opaque gray substance. What the hell is it? An environmental treatment? Plasticine ashes? Covert sin?
“As it turns out, the whole love thing doesn’t really leave because you will it to. I don’t know what to do.” Bradley inhales and holds it for as long as he can, until his shoulders shudder and he artfully exhales a long stream of smoke through the inch of unrolled space in the car window. “I have to just wait it out, wait for that day when I don’t care anymore. I’m waiting to love him less, though that’s happening pretty goddamn slowly, if at all. But I think letting someone go is like the Holy Spirit entering your heart: you can’t make it happen, you just have to be available to it.”
And I’m a little lost on the theology angle, mainly just thinking: Love? Huh? Are you kidding me?
“So, yeah, I guess so,” I say, encouragingly, my voice fraught with faux casualness, with my I’m so down with your relationship with the abusive priest vibe. I nod excessively. What is there to say?
“Anyway, it’s an old story, I know. I think the pedestrian aspect of it is what bothers me most.” Bradley takes another long drag. “I went to Disneyland, and I got the Mickey Mouse ears. Although I didn’t really understand that at the time.”
This seems slightly rehearsed, but optimistic, as if he’s wishing himself into a world where he will be free, a summation of heartache with an amusement-park analogy.
“So,” I say, because it is apparently impossible for me to start a sentence without nodding and saying “so.” And I’ll be goddamned if I don’t say it again with a nod that’s verging on a perpetual head bobble. “So, wow—”
“I saw him last night. Here. It was a little better between us.… We smoked a lot and, you know … Usually when I see him now, it’s just crazy. It’s nothing. He’s all formal and hearty: ‘Hellooo, Bradley! Bradley, I hope you’re studying and not going to too many keggers!’ ”
“Keggers? Who says ‘keggers’? Does he think it’s 1982?”
Bradley looks up at the church and over at the carriage house behind it, the same sweet Tudor-and-stone style as the church and Bradley’s own home, just blocks away. This whole neighborhood so Hansel-and-Gretel quaint. I know that not only has Bradley been in the house, he probably knows the domestic mysteries of it, the hand towels, magazines and ottomans, the brand of dishwashing liquid next to the kitchen sink.
I try not to think about Bradley seeing Father Bob last night.
“None of it really matters, anyway. I’ve figured it out. He has someone new. His name is Miles. He was a couple years behind me in school. He comes from this super, super rich family that’s trying to bring back the Latin Mass. So I feel bad for him … I guess. Miles. He’s never going to be able to have the gay talk with his parents. You can tell they love their country club Christ more than any of their kids.”
Anther brilliant comment from me: “Wow.” It’s the best I can do with all this new information, with my mind swirling with Father Bob and Bradley, Father Bob and Miles. What animal should you never play cards with? A cheetah!
The church door flings open and Father Bob appears, his cassock billowing out like a superhero cape as he leans down and fixes the doorstop.
Bradley takes a long last drag off his joint, then opens the car door and stuffs the stub into a short cliff of dirty snow. And then we sit in silence as we watch Father Bob, or as Bradley calls him, Robert. He folds his hands behind his back and looks up at the sky. Soon, people stream or straggle out of the church. Most everyone stops to chat with Father Bob, to shake his hand. He cups his hand over a little girl’s head while he leans down to talk to her, then throws back his head and laughs.
Bradley sighs. “You know, the thing is, my parents are so goddamn nice, it’s annoying. They’ve always tried so hard.” He assumes a chirpy falsetto, approximating a mom’s voice: “Bradley, you are always free to bring a love interest home for dinner or to play backgammon, I don’t want you to feel any different than your brother would about bringing a girl home.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s totally nice.” In truth, I had thought all Catholics were kind of jackassy about these matters.
“Although I’m not quite sure my mom would have been so thrilled had I shown up at home and said, ‘Mom, waiting on the front porch is my very special date for the evening. We are deeply in love, so please don’t freak out that he’s older than I am. Oh, and one more thing, my special guy is none other than beloved Father Bob.’ ”
I laugh, thinking about this complicated game of Mystery Date. It’s amazing that mothers, even kind and decent mothers, are so highly delusional. I remember my own mom at Target, yukking it up with Alecia Hardaway’s mom over algebra teachers and playgroups. Their candied view seems so lame, but I suppose that mothers simply cannot know. My mind veers into grammatical confusion, and I correct myself; I let myself feel the pain of the singular, the punch of the past conditioned tense: My mother simply could not have known.
Bradley drums his fingers on the dashboard. “Shall we blow this Popsicle stand? This little old Eucharist-wafer shack?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “I’m starving.”
I manage to back out of the parking space, but the place is jumping with crazy Catholic drivers. They may have enjoyed Mass, but now they are definitely ready to get the hell out of here. I get stuck behind a jumble of cars. Bradley is looking out the window, watching Father Bob. I look up at the church and wonder again about the coating of gray on the stained-glass windows. Inside, the lit windows are so gorgeous, the robes of the saints glowingly root-beer brown, bottle green and velvet blue, their Cupid’s bow mouths as jeweled and red as crushed rubies.
I point up at the windows. “What’s the deal? Why can’t you see the stained glass from the outside?”
Bradley looks up and says, “The church had to put a protective covering on them a few years back so they co
uld get insurance.”
I stare at the windows, inadvertently taking my foot off the brake and nearly hitting the Escalade that has pulled out in front of me, that big glimmering vehicle with the body of Christ clinging to the snowy hood.
“Shit!” I hit the brake just as the Escalade pulls up. “Why do they need insurance—”
“People used to break the windows at night. They threw rocks.”
“Now, why would someone go and do a thing like that? Those windows are art.” But I know how pleasing it is to hear glass break at night, to live in that half second before it falls into a cushion of snow. And to break the church windows? The shrieking saints, the clash of breaking glass, rainbow shards bleeding onto the asphalt below?
Bradley smiles. “I have not the faintest idea why someone would commit such a rogue act. It is a sorrowful mystery.”
* * *
For our Saturday-night fun, we hit the International House of Pancakes; we are hopping at IHOP. We are starving to death and there is a thirty-minute wait, so we gorge on candy of unknown origins from the dirty dispensers next to the newspaper machines. By the time we’re finally seated, the overheated restaurant has made us frantic with thirst. We drink up our short glasses of ice water so quickly that the waitress sets two more down in front of us with a scolding sigh, thinking we are on meth. And of course we are equally hungry for everything on the menu and we agonize over our decisions, staring at the shiny photographs of sunny-side-up eggs and hot chocolate topped with ivory whorls of whipped cream. In the end, I go with a huge-ass stack of pancakes topped with bright, canned strawberries. Bradley gets the blueberry crepes. We drink cup after cup of coffee—we have to! It’s so weak once you grow accustomed to espresso.
And then we discover—via our sugared headaches—that a low-protein diet might make us even more mentally ill, so we very politely order a second meal of breakfast meats. The sausage is black and flaking from the grill and the bacon is severely undercooked, soft and curly blond at the edges. And yet still we stuff ourselves, the fried food a change of pace from the usual grief diet of cigarettes and skinny lattes balanced out by the occasional bag of peanut M&M’s, the choked-down fast food eaten in the car. And so we eat with a sad passion, we are piggish and pale blue beneath the severe fluorescent lights of IHOP. We have milk shakes for dessert and we drink them slow and sweet as poison as we ponder the inherent SAT question of IHOP: Food is to grief as ___ is to happiness.
* * *
And then we are out of the IHOP and into the night and the world glimmers and sways with its many Father Bob Dugans and Catherine Bennetts, and we are stunned all over again by the freezing wind.
Bradley zips up his jacket and walks around the Dumpster for a quick hit and I open my glove box and feel my cold, cold gun.
When Bradley finishes weed patrol and hops in the car, wreathed with smoke, a bitter campfire, I ask, “Do you want to just drive around with me for a while?”
“That’s exactly what I want to do, Sandinista,” Bradley says. Resplendent in his post-weed calm, he closes his eyes.
We rest for moment, and then I start up the Taurus.
The food is heavy in my stomach and I turn on my windshield wipers, trying to break up the little cold stars on my windshield. It’s Robert Frost’s world, we just live in it. Cruising along the winter streets, I ponder the main events of the week, the details and detritus, the boring baggage of why why why.
As I drive, Bradley honors my silence—he doesn’t ask any jackassy and/or existential questions like: Where are we going? Where have we been? He knows where I will drive, and I’m sure he knows my mind is a wasteland of why and why and why did everyone just act like nothing happened? Why? This is the world Father Bob Dugan and Catherine Bennett invented, and I see them holding hands and waving to the crowd like any politician and his wife who are the leaders of that big country called I Will Never Have to Pay for the Bad Shit That I Do. I Will Keep Smiling Like a Jackass and All Will Smile Back at Me. And behind them is their national flag flipping around in the wind, a free-floating open mouth with squiggles and lightning bolts shooting out, a pair of serpentine lips, puckering up to move in for a juicy Judas kiss.
Bradley looks out his window at nothing, at the chain restaurants and the strip malls, and I know he’s thinking of Father Bob—Rahhhbert—and his new boy—the name Miles etched on Bradley’s brain and hurting his heart; I know he’s thinking how the world you know can be yanked out from underneath you and that, my friends, is that.
And there will be nothing left for you, no witness protection program, no kindness or understanding, only bland, blind smiles and people with their teasing I know/I don’t know vibe, which of course is distilled, crystalline bullshit. Certainly a lot of people knew about the way Catherine Bennett treated Alecia Hardaway, and they never did one thing about it.
Certainly I knew; certainly I never did a thing about it.
Maybe it’s because I’m still a little Mass-dazzled, but it seems like God is calling me to act, to do something.
I cannot turn back the clock. Just as I’m thinking this my brain floods with the image of my mother changing the clocks for daylight saving time and saying, “Jesus, I’m going to be so tired in the morning.”
I am not completely powerless.
* * *
And so it seems that my car knows which way to go. The Taurus realizes that it is headed to Catherine Bennett’s house. I think how, if we could go back in time, the configuration of the passengers would be different. My mother would be me in the driver’s seat, and I would be Bradley in the passenger seat and Bradley would be unknown to me and off on some creepy adventure with Father Bob.
I take the all-too-familiar right-hand turn, and I drive down Ponderosa Lane until I get to Catherine Bennett’s house.
Bradley, without asking, knows where we are.
“So this is the teacher’s house,” he says. He turtles his head across the dark front seat for a better look. The nutcracker is still displayed in her front yard.
“Yes. I thought I’d drop by and see if she wants to go for a cup of hot cocoa with us.”
Bradley nods. “I do a lot of drive-bys too.”
I think of Bradley driving through the parking lot of Our Lady of Mercedes in his parents’ car, of seeing Father Bob’s car parked in front of his charming carriage house, a regular car made dazzling by its godly loneliness. But in the parking lot, way in the back next to the Dumpsters behind the church, there is another car, of course. Or perhaps Miles has a moped or maybe a mountain bike. In any case, Bradley is left with the image of the new boy racing through the parking lot, his breath a cold cloud, his unzipped jacket beating against his back. When Bradley looks up at the church, he doesn’t experience the comfort of the saints gazing down at him with their exquisite heartaches and unusual martyrdoms; he only sees the impenetrable, well-insured gray windows.
“I don’t think she’s home,” I say, looking at Catherine Bennett’s unlit house. “Okay,” he says.
“I’m going to circle around the back, just to check.”
And Bradley says, “Oh, okay,” with über-cheerfulness, as if my house-stalking is just the thing to do, a perfectly reasonable and legitimate errand, and so despite all my innate despair, I’m feeling pretty happy to have such a nice friend, pretty happy not to be driving down these icy streets alone.
My mind goes hazy and honeyed for a second, but then there is the voice of Catherine Bennett in my ear: Are you … Are you … Are you …
And forever is the dead feeling of life being so massively fucked up and everyone going along with all the bullshit. Where is our motherfucking pioneer spirit? What would the saints say, those nutty iconoclasts who gouged out their eyes and jammed swords into their own human hearts?
Navy blue moonlight shines through the trees, and I think of Alecia Hardaway screwing up her face, trying so hard to find just the right answer, and a deep, spreading anger blooms in me, a goth-black garden rose with charre
d and cancerous petals and splashed with pale yellow Pollyanna surprise at the unringing phone. And then there are the thorns of Catherine Bennett’s paisley slip, the sight of which was never a victory, only a flag of grotesquerie that forms behind my eyelids like a blood blister, and I take the corner too fast.
There is the dark, stomach-flip thrill of my car fishtailing across the snowy street, the streetlights peering down like brontosaurus heads on their beanpole bodies.
There is the close-up image of my mom dancing around the kitchen in an orange poncho and jeans, and off in the hazy-snow distance there she is again, my mother standing on the street corner, my mother daydreaming and drinking her cappuccino and Oh, Mom, where are you? I love you I love you I do and then there is the half second of slick wild ahhhhh, before Bradley ruins my bliss of black ice by yelling, “Pump the brakes!”
I lean back and brace my arms to the steering wheel—my body seems to know to do this—but I forget to pump the brakes, even with Bradley imploring me to pump the brakes. What I do is slam my foot on the brake, and the car carnival spins, wild and thrilling, before it slides sideways across the street. I lose my grip entirely. My arms give way and my forehead smacks the side window. There is both the chaos of movement and total stillness as pain radiates down my temple. Bradley says, “Jesus!” And it’s more a panicked plea than curse, and next comes the slam-danced icy stop before the lurching and crunching.
My glove box pops open, showering the floor with insurance information, cough drops, lipsticks and hair ties, and the box of bullets. My pink gun sails out and lands on the front seat between us. We are at an odd angle; the car has risen up in front like an obese person standing on her heels, struggling for equilibrium.
“Honey,” Bradley says. Sometimes my mother called me that, and I think of the honey in a jar my mother bought at the farmers’ market, the fat waxy honeycomb planted in the middle. It is my mother’s voice I hear when Bradley says it again, her far-off, star-dazzled sweetness.
The Sharp Time Page 16