by Rita Ciresi
The phone went silent. Realizing I hadn’t even bolted the door behind me, I cradled the phone against my shoulder, walked over, and sadly turned the locks one by one. I sat down on my director’s chair—the only piece of furniture I had in the entire apartment besides a double mattress on the floor, two TV trays that served as impromptu dinner tables, a rickety clothes tree rescued from the side of the curb, which I meant to paint white but never did, and two cardboard chests of drawers with blue plastic handles that usually fell off when you pulled them.
“Are you all alone now?” Dodie asked.
“Take an educated guess.”
“I’ll come over when I get off work. In the meantime, don’t do anything stupid.”
“I think I’ve already done it.”
Dodie hesitated. “You can’t take it back now.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said, and burst into tears.
Dodie showed up at eight-thirty. I pulled myself off my bed, where I had spent the last four hours curled up, alternately dreaming and weeping, relieved that at least my mattress wasn’t the place where I had conceived the only baby I probably ever would have. Or not have. Otherwise I couldn’t have put my head down on the foam and fallen asleep.
When I opened the door, the apartment was flooded with the smell of Chinese takeout. Dodie came in cradling a paper bag in his arm, which he put down in what passed for my kitchen: a gas stove with only one functional burner, a mini-refrigerator with a freezing unit chock-full of ice, and a small cabinet, all jammed in what probably used to be a walk-in closet. I crawled back into bed, and Dodie sat down next to me in the director’s chair, his face grim and serious.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I said.
“What way?”
“You know. So disapproving.”
“I’m not sitting in judgment on you, Lise.”
I didn’t believe him. For a short, painful moment—as the radiator clicked and then hissed on—I was intensely aware that Dodie was a man, and although he was a man who didn’t love women, his gender irritated me. He never would know how far my stomach dropped when I counted up to thirty-three. He never would be forced to make the kind of decision I just had made. For the first time in my life I envied Dodie’s sexuality, simply because he could not get pregnant, nor would he ever get somebody else—to use another of my mother’s garbled idioms—in the trouble. Then I remembered he could only—only!—get AIDS.
“Why don’t you understand?” I asked him.
“But I do. What else could you have done?”
“That’s what I keep telling myself. What else could I have done? I mean, I was careful. I had my diaphragm in. It just didn’t work, it didn’t work.… Why couldn’t it have happened to Carol? Why did I get pregnant without even trying or wanting, and she tries and wants, but can’t?”
I reached for my box of Kleenex, conveniently parked right by my pillow. Dodie’s sad face functioned as a mirror for me: I knew I looked like hell, absolutely wild and scary, with my hair every which way, my clothes all rumpled, and my face bloated.
Dodie leaned his elbows on the shaky arms of the director’s chair. “How much did it cost?”
“Three fifty.” I grabbed a Kleenex and blew my nose. “Did you know you could put an abortion on a Visa?”
“Did you?”
I shook my head. “Cash on the nail.”
Dodie looked around my apartment, his eyes lingering on the cardboard chest of drawers and the monstrous gray radiator, then finally settling on one of the many long cracks that splintered the ceiling. “You’re going to be strapped. You already are strapped. You’d better think about getting out of New York, Lise. You can’t live like this forever.”
“How’m I gonna live, then?”
“Like a decent human being.”
“I don’t have it in me to be decent now.”
“Who’s talking morals? I’m talking finances.”
“How much do I have saved?”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to let you touch that.”
“It’s my money.”
“You agreed, way back when, not to touch it. I won’t let you touch it.” He stared hard at me. “Get a good haircut and get another job.”
“All right. God. I can’t help my hair. I’ve tried everything, even mayonnaise.”
“George claimed sesame oil was good.”
“Why do I need grease when already I look like Al Pacino from the back? When it’s wet or oily it’s even worse—totally Sinatra, and I don’t mean Nancy either.” I blew my nose again. “God. I’m going nuts. I’m editing this terrible manuscript at work.”
“Another shit book on discovering the child within?”
“No, this is a new one. I’m the Nazi expert now. This is a collection of Holocaust memories.”
“How cheerful,” Dodie said. “Why don’t they give it to somebody Jewish? Don’t you have any Jews in your office?”
“There’s only one. She edits the Mafia books—”
“And who does the books on how to talk to your dog and have atomic sex while drinking espresso and eating chili peppers all at the same time? That nice gee-gee I met?”
“No, he does the books on wedding etiquette.”
“How disgusting,” Dodie said. “Come on, Lise. Get out of publishing.”
“But what else am I going to do?” I fixed my pillow, trying unsuccessfully to plump up its battered feathers before I put my head back down on it. I stared at the ceiling. “This manuscript I’m working on is really getting to me. It’s making me sick to look at it. I keep staring at the pages and trying to concentrate on the words, but I get so wrapped up in the stories, and then I have to go back and read the page all over again, and it’s all so crazy and weird and I start thinking how could stuff like that ever happen?”
“The word is evil,” Dodie said.
I blew my nose. I had just edited three hundred and fifty pages of evil, and I still had another two hundred and twenty-five to go. I focused on the flaking paint on the ceiling. “In this manuscript—you know, the one I’m working on—there’s this story about a guy who watched a Gestapo guard throw his pregnant wife down on the camp ground and stomp on her stomach until the baby came out. Then he stuck a Luger up her crotch and pulled the trigger—”
“Stop it,” Dodie said. “Don’t tell me that stuff”
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” I said. “I mean, the guy’s still alive, he has to go to work every morning and pick out green beans with almonds at the grocery store and write checks to cover his electric bill, and how does he do it?”
“Did he say? In the manuscript?”
“He said he hated to go to sleep because he was afraid to dream about it. And then he said, ‘I just wanted to survive, that’s all I wanted, just to hang on to my own life.’ ”
“God. What for?” Dodie bit his lip. “I’d throw myself against the fence.” He rose and went into the kitchen. “Which do you want,” he called out, “the wonton or the hot-and-sour?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve got to eat something. I’m not leaving until you put something in your stomach.”
How could I put anything in me, considering what had just been taken out? But to please Dodie, I had a little of the wonton broth. Dodie went after the hot-and-sour, then cleaned out the entire pint of pork fried rice. He crunched on the fried noodles with such obvious relish that I had to give in and have a few myself, even though I didn’t want to leave crumbs on the bed sheet.
“Fortune-cookie time,” Dodie said at the end.
I shook my head. I didn’t feel I deserved good fortune—and since when did those neat little slips of paper folded inside the hard cookies ever tell you anything negative?
Dodie cracked the first cookie and unscrolled the paper. “The tree on the top of the mountain feels the most wind,” he said. He had to grit his teeth to open the cellophane bag of the second cookie, and the cookie itself was so hard it splintered into piece
s before he pulled the slip out. He read it and crumpled it.
“No,” I said. “Show it to me.” I reached up and pried it from his fist.
A child is as good as its parent.
I recrumpled it and fell back on the mattress, crying again. Dodie sighed. He got out my broom and swept up the fortune-cookie crumbs, then cleaned up in the kitchen in a futile attempt to stave off the cockroaches. He used my phone to rearrange his plans (“It’s my cousin, she’s in bad shape, no really, I can’t, I just can’t, she’s a mess, here, listen to her crying, go ahead, crank it up, Lise, for the benefit of those who won’t believe me!”). I cranked it up. Dodie got off the phone, dimmed the lamp, and sat next to me on the mattress. He lit up a joint and we smoked it. It grew later and later, and still Dodie sat over me.
I drifted off. The next thing I knew the digital clock clicked onto 1:00. I heard Dodie testing the top door lock. His wallet thudded onto the canvas seat of the director’s chair. His keys clanked on top. These were the sounds I liked to hear from men, the sounds I actually preferred to their voices (unless, of course, they were whispering my name in my ear). Shoes dropping to the floor. The slide of a tie along a collar. The softness of buttons being undone. The clack of the belt. The promising metal rip of a zipper.
“Move over,” Dodie said.
I already had rolled completely against the wall, but it was only a double mattress, and when Dodie climbed under the quilt and sheet, I could feel the brush of his leg against mine. I sensed that Dodie had kept on his T-shirt and shorts, but I was fully clothed, in my sweat suit and socks and even a hairband to keep my dirty curls off my face.
Many times, over the years, Dodie and I had slept in the same room. But we never had shared a bed. The situation felt uneasy until Dodie finally hung a name on it. “This is weird,” he whispered.
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve never slept with a girl before. I’ve never even slept with an Italian before.”
Because I still felt the marijuana running through me, I snorted and burst into giggles, making the mattress quiver. I kicked him under the covers. He nudged me back.
“I stopped sleeping with guinea guys when I left New Haven,” I said. Sleep, however, was a misnomer, for none of these boys had done me in a position in which it was physically possible to catch forty winks afterward.
“You certainly did your share of them,” Dodie said.
“I know, Mr. Mathematician. I, too, can count.”
Dodie hesitated. “Why do you do this to yourself?”
“Do what?”
“You know. Sleep around.”
“Like you never did?”
“In my case, there was a selection process involved.”
“I’m choosy too,” I said. “I draw the line at men who spit.”
“Like your father?”
“Yeah,” I said. My father had been known for chewing the ends of his White Owl cigars and spewing them—with admirable skill—from the cracked steps on our back porch ten feet away into my mother’s tomato garden. When she yelled at him, he claimed the chewed tobacco made good fertilizer.
My stomach felt hollow as I thought of the gruff relationship my mother and father had with one another and the coldness that had seeped into every corner of my parents’ house, so that it still felt like winter far beyond my birthday every May.
Dodie must have been thinking the same about his own parents, because without a word spoken, he took my hand and squeezed it. We lay there quietly in the dark for a long time, listening to the doors opening and closing in the echo of the hall and the intermittent sound of sirens. Just before I fell asleep, Dodie’s voice—distant, almost disembodied—murmured, “Man, I used to get down on my knees and pray my mother was not my mother and my father not my father. I used to pray.”
A week later I stood in line at Saint Patrick’s for confession. My heart thumped as I went into the prayer box and knelt in the corner. I heard the priest mumbling to the person on the other side, and just as I was about to bolt, the screen slid back, and I stared into the space reserved for the priest. I knew I wasn’t supposed to look directly at him, nor was he supposed to turn his eyes on me. Yet I peeked long enough to discover the priest was young—surely no more than thirty. I took this as a sign he would be more forgiving.
“Father,” I whispered, “I’ve forgotten the words.”
He asked if I wanted to repeat them after him, and so I did, up until the phrase and these are my sins.
Then I told him why I was there.
“This is a very serious offense against God,” he finally said. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“The father?”
“I don’t know who it was.”
“It sounds as if you have other things you need to confess.”
“Where should I start?” I asked. “I mean, I could confess my whole life. I could say I’m sorry for being a human being—”
“God doesn’t want you to do that.”
“Well, what does God want us to do?” I asked, too loudly.
He lowered his voice as a reminder that I should do the same. “God wants us to live our faith.”
“I guess I don’t have faith.”
“You do or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m confused.”
“You obviously don’t keep the sacraments. Go to church. Make frequent confessions and take Communion. And pray.”
I think I made a face, which I was afraid he saw—for he, too, was disobeying the rules and looking out of the corner of his eye at me.
“Isn’t there anything more than that?” I asked.
“Don’t live for yourself. God gave you life. He didn’t give you life so you could take it away from others—”
“I can’t fix it now. I can’t take it back—”
“Are you sorry for this? Or just sorry you’ve gotten caught?”
“Both,” I said. Then I added, “Look, I’m holding up the line outside.”
“This isn’t a department store,” the priest said. “I’m still waiting to hear the rest of your confession.”
“I’m not sure I’m sorry for anything else.”
“Then I can’t grant you absolution.”
Well, what the hell? I thought, before I opened my mouth and let it all spill out. My attention to detail—the very thing that made me a good editor—also made me a thorough storyteller. I told him about my dirty dozen back in New Haven and all the guys—there had been a lot of guys—in New York. I also told him I slept with Dodie. Even though we hadn’t done anything more than hold each other that night, we woke up to find a spot of blood—rusty as a flaking barbed-wire fence—on the sheet between us.
“That’s called incest,” the priest said.
“But we didn’t do anything—”
“Did you want to”—his voice tightened—“do something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. How am I supposed to put a stop to my imagination? Why did God give me such an imagination if he didn’t want me to use it?”
The priest told me that God may have granted me imagination, but the devil himself made fine use of it.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“Put your imagination to work for God,” he told me, and granted me absolution. A minute later I was on my knees in one of the side pews, reciting my penance, which the priest made me promise to say every evening until I felt confident I could lead a better, purer life.
“Every evening,” the priest said. “Will you do that for me?”
Anything for you, I almost said—because I already had formed a foolish crush on him. As I mumbled my Hail Marys, I thought about how I wanted to step through the screen that separated us and have the priest wrap me up in his robes and tell me, There, there, Lise, I love you more than God Himself.
Was there any greater sin than this? Fantasizing about embracing—or boinking—a priest? Wouldn’t this be one of the crimes we studied in catechism—one of the sin
s that cried out for vengeance? What were they again? Murder. Sodomy (What’s that? someone asked Sister Matthew, and she said it was ill treatment of other men). Taking advantage of the poor? Depriving the worker of his wages? Lusting after people who already had pledged their lives to other human beings or to Christ?
As I got up from the pew I remembered how easy it all had seemed back in the days of catechism, marching into the confessional and admitting I had told a few lies and said an occasional shit or damn. Then I had slipped up to the altar and recited my three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, leaving the church feeling utterly free and pure, as if the pressing weight of the cross itself had been lifted off my shoulders.
Yet this time it hadn’t worked. I felt no better when I came out of Saint Patrick’s than when I went in. This time I would have to forgive myself, but I didn’t feel capable of making that leap. Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe this was my version of the self-punishment I used to witness in the dorms at Sarah Lawrence: the neurotic girls who cut fine lines on their forearms with razors, who gave themselves nightly enemas, or who sat in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of tweezers, yanking hair after hair out of the front of their scalps until they resembled the women in medieval portraits whose high foreheads shone as bright as the polished hood on my brother-in-law’s car.
Yes, I punished myself Then God Himself took a turn. After I finished editing the Nazi hunter’s memoirs, I had to proofread yet another killer manuscript: a collection of interviews with the children of survivors, in which they described the trauma of growing up with parents who had looked the worst kind of evil right in the face. The stories both the children and the parents told sickened me, and every night when I went to bed and said my penance I tried hard not to question why I was praying to a God who permitted such things to happen.
One night in the middle of the Act of Contrition, I heard a dry scratching sound coming from the kitchen. I listened. The scritch-scratch sounded like the static on a radio speaker, as if at any moment a voice might come in. But the senseless, untranslatable noise continued. I rose from the mattress, failing to close off my communion with God—as we were taught to do—with a good sign of the cross (“Touch your forehead and your breastbone and each shoulder as if you’re proud to carry the cross like Jesus,” Sister Joseph said).