“God, why do you always do that? Nothing’s ever about me unless it lets you off the hook. Like you never loved Marty and only married him to be nice to me. Like that was ever even one of your concerns.”
“Oh, Soph. You’re a big girl now. Do things have to be so extreme?”
Jayne is quiet. It does not seem like the right moment—if ever there is one—to ask her mother whether she really slept with Dad’s old partner, a rookie cop Jayne remembers as having a wiry body and a pocket full of gum. Her father might have imagined it, as out of touch with reality as he was by the end. Jayne remembers the fights, the way her mother tried to hold his head when he said everyone was against him. Remembers even more clearly, only weeks before his death, the way Dad drove her to the police station when she’d been caught stealing taffy from the corner store: he made her sit in the back and turned his siren on, warned her about the rats in jail and how to make sure she kept the blanket over her head because they liked to nest in hair, until she, pathetic little Sophie, was crying so hard she hardly noticed Dad had turned the car around and was heading home without leaving her. So what if Mom succumbed to—even initiated—a fling with a cheerful, eager body? What was that compared to the fact that Dad never loved his own child. If he had, how could he have left her to strangers?
“Mom,” Jayne says, because her mother, having said her part, is sure to hang up soon without asking Jayne anything about her life, secure there is nothing to tell. “Do you really believe that Dad is in hell? I mean, with what we know now about faulty brain chemistry and depression—clearly he should have been on medication, right? Do you really believe that his taking his life was a moral failure God could never forgive?”
There is silence. Perhaps some truths should never be uttered. Mom is breathing, making small noises that seem to be attempts at speech. Jayne bursts. She is crying again; she is so weak. “Well?”
“Sophie, honey, I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember ever having said anything like that—I don’t know where you would have gotten that idea.”
“But you said it all the time, to the priest, to your whole side of the family! How can you not remember? Besides, you’re Catholic—isn’t it implicit?”
“Darling,” Mom says, and her voice is sad, but present, fully here. “I am a married woman having an affair with a married man behind my Jewish husband’s back. What kind of Catholic do you think I am? I’m human, like everyone else. The year after your father died is like a fog to me. I was hardly more than twenty-five, with a child to support, and I’d never held a job. What can I say to you?” She sighs, the breath almost nostalgic. “It was another lifetime ago, Sophie. We were so, so young.”
From the outside, Saint Benedict’s Church and School, near the house where Dad died, has changed. The school has been expanded, and things look cleaner, newer, at the same time as even the streets seem smaller to Jayne’s adult frame. Inside, though, it is like walking back through time. She has heard the priest here now is young, hip. Jayne enters the dark foyer, averts her eyes from the holy water as she stands in the center aisle then takes a seat on the “Joseph” side. He is a father, too—one who disappeared from the Bible, perhaps dead long before Jesus began his ministry. Did his son miss him? Earthly families were not supposed to be important compared with God, Jayne remembers—but God was not there to hold her head when she was sick; her body did not feel God’s embrace. When Dad was writhing in his crazy misery, God did not magically change the workings of his mind to offer ease. God could not even cure Mom of her neediness for men—from her lust even now, in her fifties. Not “couldn’t,” Mom would say, “doesn’t choose to.” In any test of free will, Jayne’s family has failed. If earthly detachment is a prerequisite to holiness, Jayne and Mom are fucked, both—they cannot stop thrashing, wanting, needing. It makes them hurt others without caution; they will do anything for a momentary salve.
She cannot call Marty and come clean, either about her long-ago pregnancy or Mom’s affair. What father, what husband wants to know? In lieu, she will call Kinkos and confess to being a woman scorned. She will quit Saint Xavier’s and look for a secular job where nobody knows her mother; will ask Mom to stop buying her designer labels and pay for an art class instead. No, she will get a night job to pay for her own class. She will do what her father never could: hold on to hope that things can change. That she can change, too.
Or maybe none of these things will happen. Maybe her life is already too solidly defined, with all the endless monotony and disappointment of being an acne-prone, no-longer-young woman in a dead-end job with a botched education and a pox on her family’s house—a life that does not always feel worth living. But if she is cursed, she will have to live with it, because it is just too cruel, too unfair even for someone selfish and damaged, to cause her mother that much pain. And maybe this is the kernel of sanity and God that she retains—that Dad could not—and she will have to spend the rest of her life hugging it in her bed alone at night, nursing it like her one true light.
The incense here still lingers from Mass this afternoon. But Jayne prefers the Nag Champa she burns in her own apartment, the kind Blaine introduced her to—a smell so different from his smell, one that belongs to her even though he has gone away. She will not stay here long. But once, her father sat in this church, perhaps in this very pew with his teenage bride, both young and shiny and full of stupid, beautiful hope. She will remain just a little while, try to believe that she can feel him.
Acknowledgments
“Slut Lullabies,” Water~Stone Review
“How to Marry a WASP,” Blithe House Quarterly
“What You See,” Hawai’i Review
“Secret Tomas,” Clackamas Literary Review
“Trilby in Brasil,” Fish Stories: Collective III (as “The Svengali Complex”)
“Waves,” Swink
“The Marie Antoinette School of Economics,” River Oak Review
“Attila the There,” StoryQuarterly and A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (OV Books)
“Saving Crystal,” Emergence IV (as “Shopping for Crystal”)
“Stalking God,” Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (Soft Skull Press)
I am deeply appreciative to all the individuals and organizations from whose support these stories (and I) benefited over the years. In particular I would like to thank the Illinois Arts Council, whose fellowship program and Literary Awards grants provided rare and much needed monetary support for my writing, and Ragdale, a space not all that far from my Chicago home in miles but far enough in spirit and vibe that the entirety of one of these pieces was written on my very first afternoon there...if largely in an effort on my part to avoid walking on the prairie in the snow. Thank you to all the editors and readers of the literary magazines where these stories first appeared, especially M. M. M. Hayes, Leelila Strogov, Amy Davis, Allison Parker, Mary Rockcastle, Daphne Gottlieb, Aldo Alvarez, Trevor Dodge, Andy Mingo, and of course Stacy Bierlein, who each deserves more kudos than I can possibly give for fighting the good fight for short fiction and indie publishing. I am immensely grateful for Bryan Tomasovich, an editor who not only actually edits but involved me in the publication process every step of the way, combining the best of old-school standards with new innovations. My appreciation extends to the whole Emergency Press team—especially Stephanie Lucero, Kymberlee della Luce, Hollan Read, and Crystal Fosnaugh—for creativity and patience. And the biggest thanks to my “usual suspects,” otherwise known as The Group, who were the (unwitting) inspiration for many of these pieces, and who despite figuring out long ago that writers are gossips, liars, and thieves have loved me anyway.
BOOKS FROM EMERGENCY PRESS
American Junkie, by Tom Hansen
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IMPATIENCE, a Poem in 52 Pieces, by Scott Zieher
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Touched by Lightning, by Ernest Loesser
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23-4-1, Paperback, $15.00
Six Trips in Two Directions, by Jayson Iwen
ISBN 0-9753623-2-1, Paperback, $15.00
The Border Will Be Soon: Meditations on the Other Side, by Chad Faries
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VIRGA, a Poem by Scott Zieher
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Emergency Press
emergencypress.org
[email protected]
Gina Frangello is the author of the critically acclaimed novel My Sister’s Continent. She is the executive editor and co-founder of Other Voices Books and the editor of the fiction section at The Nervous Breakdown. Her short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies including StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner and The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing. She has contributed journalism and book reviews to many publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader and the Hyde Parke Review of Books. She guest-edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters, and from 1997-2007 served as the editor of the literary magazine, Other Voices.
Gina lives in Chicago with her husband, twin daughers and son, and teaches at Columbia College and Northwestern University. She can be found online at ginafrangello.com.
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