by Joanna Rose
“Are you stoned?”
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“Even Michael has been praying with them. He’s been going to church more and more at home, and now there’s this. It’s like he’s turning Super-Catholic.”
“Do you go with him?”
“To church? No.”
“Does he want you to?”
“He did yesterday, and I got the headache, this really weird headache. But not usually.”
“Well, it sounds okay.”
“No, there’s more. He hangs out with this other prayer group.”
“Serious? Does he act different? Like, does he pray around the house?”
“Well, no.”
“Look,” she said. “I have to get ready for work. What are you doing today? Just waiting at the hospital?”
“I’m here at the house. I’ll call you later, or you call me.”
“Pattianne,” she said. “Don’t be a feeb.”
In Mrs. Bryn’s room, there was a crucifix on the wall and a dark wooden Madonna on the dresser centered in front of the mirror. Rosary beads on the nightstand. Claire’s old bedroom was pink, posters of horses on the wall, and a small pink crucifix with a delicate golden Jesus hanging above the door. A girl’s crucifix. In the yellow guest room there was a small brass crucifix above the door.
Pattianne straightened the blanket, and then pulled it off the bed completely, and then the sheet too, and made the bed from scratch. Claire might have left her cigarettes in her bathrobe pocket, she could step out back, have a quiet smoke. She got Michael’s shirts and took them downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and wondered how to find a dry cleaner’s nearby, and she thought she’d get a cell phone. She wondered what the name of the black lab was, in the picture with Michael over the kitchen door. She wondered if she could figure out the space-age coffee maker. She wondered why Jen thought she was a feeb. She was dialing her number again when the doorbell chimed its three pretty chimes.
Sister Anne Stephen stood there with a brown paper bag and a big manila envelope in one arm and an umbrella held open over her fuzzy gray head. A nun, but at least a fun one, a distraction.
“I talked to Dory on the phone from the hospital. Michael Senior seems to be doing okay so far, bless the day. And she said you were here. I bet you like bagels—all you young people like bagels nowadays,” and she was in, handing over the grocery bag and stamping her blue Keds on the gray stones of the entryway. She closed the umbrella, closed the door, and looked at Pattianne, her glasses fogging up.
“I do,” Pattianne said, sounding for all the world like she was up for some fun. “Bagels, love ’em.”
“And Dory’s got raspberry jam because I made it last summer and gave it to her.” She headed up to the kitchen. “Now me,” she says, “raspberry jam is the dickens with these pretty teeth of mine—the seeds, you know.”
The manila envelope landed on the dining room table on the way through, Pattianne following the nun into the kitchen, where she stopped and gave her a look from under those bushy eyebrows.
“You weren’t doing so good yesterday morning now, were you?”
“I had a headache.”
A small gold pin hung crooked on the collar of her blue striped blouse. There seemed to be a spot of egg there too. The pin was round, with a cross and initials were worked in there, official somehow. Her official I-am-a-nun pin.
She said, “There’s a reheat button on this coffee pot. Just a headache? A little stomach upset maybe?”
Pattianne said, “Just a headache. I have to wash my face, I’ll be right back.” She ran up the stairs, and splashed cold water on her face again and again. Everything in this house felt sticky, and outside was New Jersey. God knew how long she and Michael would be here. She was married to a stranger. She married a stranger.
She thought, I fucked up.
Her wet face in the mirror was just her own: Pattianne Anthony, nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter-in-law, just the same old someone who could be invisible in the corner of a bar and live happily ever after. Not a stranger.
Nobody’s mother. The last thing she wanted to be was somebody’s mother.
The smell of toasted bagels came up on the air, and coffee. She went back down.
Sister Anne Stephen said, “There, I’ll grab this stuff and my coffee, and we’ll just make ourselves useful. And there, you grab those bagels.” And off she went out the kitchen doorway, picked up the manila envelope on her way through the dining room, and went down the stairs, all the way down, to the room that was Michael’s old bedroom, long since turned into an office.
The walls were blue, the carpet tan, the desk stacked with mail. A big old Mac stared out blank on the desk, and sliding glass doors stared out into the rainy backyard, which stared back. There was a Nerf ball hoop on a metal wastebasket and a library table in one corner.
Sister Anne Stephen set down the manila envelope and her coffee cup. Pattianne set the bagels down and took one. The cream cheese was melting into the butter. She hadn’t eaten anything but pound cake in a long time.
There was a small crucifix of pale wood over the door.
Sister Anne Stephen went to one bookshelf and stood there for a minute, then went to another, stood there.
“Aha.” And she knelt, and groaned, “Here we go, we’re off to the races,” and she pulled a leather-covered scrapbook from the bottom shelf. She put the scrapbook on the table next to the manila envelope and her coffee. She lined up a pair of scissors from the desk drawer, and a roll of Scotch tape, and four or maybe five pens.
“So,” she said, “sit yourself down, Bridey. We get to stay home on a rainy day and play with scissors.” They both sat themselves down.
Pattianne tried to picture Michael sleeping here, living here. Bunk beds on the back wall, maybe. Now there was a bookcase there, mostly videos and DVDs, Star Wars, old games, Super Mario. They moved him down here when he was fifteen, a boy’s room. It felt like it had always been the computer room. Sister Anne Stephen pulled a clump of newspaper clippings out of the envelope.
“So,” she said. “First we need to sort through and arrange these by date. Most of them got the date there, either written in or cut out so the date is there. See here,” and she opened one article up onto the table and smoothed the fold, smoothed it open on the table, running her bent, wrinkled fingers over and over the piece of newspaper.
Project Life Lawyer Found in Contempt of Court.
“This one, see, headline, still has the date. Let’s see, I need to clean off these specs. Hold on.” And she took off her glasses and pulled out a shirttail.
Two men in suits on the steps of a building, one looking at the camera. It was Mr. Bryn.
“There we go,” Sister Anne Stephen said, putting her glasses back on. “That one is pretty recent. There’s others in here I know are older. Here we go. You might want to snip the edges, make them nice and tidy, like all of what’s in here.” And she opened the scrapbook. It was fat with clippings.
Prayer vigils were the least of it. In one photo, police were dragging a girl away. Another showed the broken windows of a building, police standing in front of them. A crowd shot, protest signs held high.
Sister Anne Stephen said, “Bless them.”
Outside, rain. Inside, Pattianne sat, hating Sister Anne Stephen, hating the people in the picture. She had always hated them, an irrational, spinning rage that went away after driving past a clinic, or after turning the page of a newspaper, or when a different news story came on the news. Christians and Right-to-Lifers, always lumped together and dismissed.
“These aren’t the best pens. This one’s out of ink,” Sister Anne Stephen said, and she tossed a pen into a wastebasket, the loud ping of it ringing on Pattianne’s skin. “I’m the kind of person that throws away a pen when it quits on me,” she said. Then her voice got lower, softer. “Now look here, look here.” And she held out a clipping, a color picture of a building blackened by fire, fenced off
with yellow police tape. In the foreground is Mr. Bryn, on his knees, his eyes closed, his hands clasped in prayer.
“Looks like Michael Junior in that picture, wouldn’t you say?” Sister Anne Stephen leaned close, her finger pointing, barely touching the picture. “Look at those beautiful curls, and such a sweet face, all closed in his praying.”
You married into a family of religious fanatics.
Don’t be a feeb.
“Bridey,” Sister Anne Stephen said. “Don’t let that butter get on the papers, girl. Here’s a paper towel.”
He did. He looked just like Michael. His face was calm and sweet. The words in her head were I hate them all. The words in her head were I have to get Michael out of here.
They snipped and taped, and Sister Anne Stephen talked about God knows what.
After she left, Pattianne washed out the big urn. She figured out the little coffee maker on the counter. She accidentally dropped a pretty Italian pottery plate, and it smashed into a hundred pieces.
She fixed tuna-salad sandwiches, and they all came home late in the afternoon and crowded around the bistro table, and she waited for them to bow their heads and hold hands and say grace first. She waited for a chance to say, No, I can’t do that, I’m not like you. But they all just sat down and ate—Michael, and Claire, and Mrs. Bryn.
They all stayed up late, talking in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Claire’s coursework at Slippery Rock. St. Cloud and the St. Cloud School for Boys. Pattianne would get up and pour coffee, put cookies on a plate. She cut up some cheese and pale green Granny Smith apples. The phone would ring, and every time it did, they would all stare at it for a moment, and then Michael answered it, slowly—a cousin, a friend—and he would take the phone into the dining room and say the same words: He’s stable, on a waiting list, coronary care, thank you thank you.
Father McGivens came, and she went to bed. She fell asleep hearing their low voices downstairs. She woke up when Michael came to bed and didn’t hear him say his prayers. He didn’t get on his knees. She didn’t want to talk about how wrong it was for her to be here. He curled around her and held her, and his body was hot and sticky. She worked herself out of his arms. She cried without making a sound.
In the morning, they all got up to go to early Mass and then straight to the hospital. Michael kissed her cheek and said, “I love you. Stay sleeping.” He went down the stairs—six footsteps, and then six more. She got up, after the house fell quiet, and went to the kitchen in her bathrobe, sat around and tried to hear something in the rain, maybe a pattern. She did the crossword puzzle.
She called Jen, who had to leave for work.
She called Miss Mimi, who had her breakfast book group over. She said, “Last month we read a book about an Islamic girl in the sixteenth century, a novel. I get to choose the Jewish novel for next month. We call ourselves the People of the Book Club. Know any good Catholic novels?”
“The Power and the Glory?”
“Oh, good one. I have a book on hummingbirds of the Midwest for you. Beautiful pictures. I’ll mail it to you. I’d love to see you, dear, but I know how it must be. So call me back, let me know how Michael’s father is. What hospital did you say? Got to go, my gals are here.”
She called her mother, who said, “It’s good that you’re there, to stay at the house and answer the phone and fix them a few meals.” She sounded worried. Pattianne thought of her being Grandma Anthony’s daughter-in-law—Grandma Anthony, who was so stern with everyone except Pattianne herself—and she said, “Thanks, Mom.” Her head throbbed.
She took Michael’s clean shirts out to the car, and she drove around. It was still raining, soft and steady straight-down rain, and that was the only thing that seemed right. She drove down to Montclair, past their old apartment, and she tried to remember what she’d been thinking when she’d said that she would marry Michael Bryn. She drove down the street where she had the abortion and tried to remember which building it was. She tried to remember ever talking with Michael about babies.
Mr. Bryn was stable, no visitors, only immediate family. He was at the top of a waiting list.
The third morning, Mrs. Bryn and Claire left for the hospital, and Michael was up in the yellow bedroom, and she was in the kitchen staring at the telephone. She wanted to call someone, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone. The door chimes rang, and she went down there and opened the door to Father McGivens, who reached out to touch her shoulder, it seemed. But she backed up and held the door open wide for him. She didn’t want to feel the warm smile that landed on her.
He said, “Feeling better?”
“I’m fine.”
Michael came down the stairs, and the two of them moved together into a big, wide-shouldered embrace, and then they headed down to the computer room.
Michael said, “I’ll be down here if Mom calls.”
They were there for a long time.
She vacuumed the gray carpeting in the living room. She washed the Italian pottery cups and saucers. She made cheese sandwiches, and cut them in triangles, and arranged them on a plate that matched the table and the cups and everything else.
She called Jen. “What do you mean, I’m a feeb?”
“You don’t pay attention to the obvious,” she said. “You pay attention to what’s not obvious.”
“What was I paying attention to?”
“Why did you go to Mass with him if you weren’t going to go Catholic?”
It felt right, the music, the idea of Communion.
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well, they’re Catholics, missy. You need a better answer than that. Why did you marry him?”
“Love.”
“Oh, please,” Jen snorted. “That’s a terrible reason.”
“Sex?”
“Only marginally better.”
“I think he wants babies.”
She said, “Duh.”
“I don’t. Well, not right now.”
And Jen said, “Me either.”
“Ever?”
“No,” she said. “But I’ll probably change my mind. That’s the kind of person I am. I’m not the kind of person who would ever marry a Catholic, though.”
“I didn’t think he was that kind of Catholic.”
“There’s only one kind of Catholic.”
“Yeah.”
“Time to deal with it.”
“It’s just this thing with his dad. It’s just the stress or something.”
“Doesn’t sound like stress to me,” she said. “Sounds like wanting a baby. I think that’s how wanting a baby works.”
“I can’t breathe in this house.”
“Go home,” she said. “Go live in Minnesota.”
And finally, they did. They left Michael’s father in stable condition, in coronary intensive care, waiting for a heart, and they drove the rental car back to the airport, did not see a hobo under the bridge, and did not talk about antiabortion protests or having babies or anything. She told herself Michael needed space.
They waited in the airport, at a snack bar with coffee that tasted like the paper cup it came in, with a New York Times crossword that she just stared at.
Why she married a Catholic was she thought it didn’t matter.
She’d asked him once, What about the pope?
And Michael told her, We don’t all agree with the pope. You can be Catholic and not necessarily agree with the pope. Popes are human.
She said, I don’t want to be a Catholic.
And he said, You just be you.
She never said, What about you being a Catholic and me not liking it?
Minneapolis was a shock of cold in clear sunny air that burned her lungs and made her eyes water. She dozed in the O-Bug all the way home, rising to the surface of sleep, and fighting her way back down.
St. Cloud felt like home. Their house was quiet and contained—walls, windows, yard, bare trees, the edge of town, the edge of all the wide fields. She could think, about being the
kind of person who would marry a Catholic, about being the kind of person who didn’t want babies. About Mr. Bryn.
The windows of their house were wide and bare, like eyes, and it was warm inside, and she turned on the deer lamp. The bare floors were straight, shiny old wood, and there were her footsteps, and there were Michael’s.
He said, “Why don’t we have curtains?”
She didn’t know why they didn’t have curtains.
He said, “We’ll go back for Christmas.”
She didn’t say, You go back for Christmas. I don’t want to go back for Christmas.
8: NEVER DRINK CHAMPAGNE IN THE AFTERNOON
There was a small cemetery on the highway out of St. Cloud, the next rise after the clinic, out toward the Sears store.
“Please,” Michael had said at six thirty, getting up for Mass. “Go with me.”
“I can’t,” she said.
But maybe she could do curtains.
The cemetery was surrounded by fields and didn’t have a name. She had noticed it before, and now she pulled in and stopped. Three crypts stood in a row along the back, under a bare black tree, a road winding around in a circle. The sky was low and gray, and everything was black and white. She sat there with the window down and the heater on high, probably running down the battery, and not even warm. Chickadees beeped. She heard them, and then she saw them.
Rows of gravestones, a different number of gravestones in each row, as if people planned on dying but not in any particular order, and a round cap of snow on top of each one. Her mother’s relatives were buried in a huge cemetery in Long Island, rolling hills of graves that go on and on. There was a map. She went there once, when her great-aunt Grace died. Pattianne never even knew her aunt Grace. She went with Grandma Anthony to her son’s grave once, Uncle Stanley. She was about eight, and didn’t remember it except that it was a cemetery on a sunny day, and how odd that he was Uncle Stanley, an uncle who didn’t live long enough to be an uncle. Her grandfather’s grave must have been right there too.
She started up again, and the O-Bug slipped around in the snow, and she prayed not to get stuck, not exactly praying, just saying please, please as the car slipped on the packed snow, fish-tailing back out onto the highway. Thank God, she wouldn’t have to explain why she was there, in a cemetery, running down the battery, since she didn’t even know.