But the voices on the radio were something other than mothers, something without beginning or end, a channel occasionally opening, an otherworldly hum looming larger than the sounds of home. Whether the transmission came from a motherhouse in Quebec or a retreat house in Lockport, a single voice called out the first line: Hail Mary, full of Grace, followed by the swarm of response: The Lord is with thee. The lone voice: Blessed art though amongst women. The amalgam of voices: And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
The words came and came, the prayers taking on forward motion, barreling over the space between womb and Jesus, the freight of the line gathering its own speed and rhythm: thywombjesus, as if Jesus were the organ and not the fruit, as if He were the one whose womb should be blessed. And what place did meaning have anyway? It was a poetry of sorts, tapping into wells beneath the surface, hitting a place beyond the reach of logic.
It was this that bore down upon me as I listened—whether in English: Holy Mary, Mother of God, or French: Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu. The radio voices pushed through the ancient curtain of words, the Hail Marys and the Glory Bes, the prayers not so much the point as the speaking of them together and aloud: Now and at the hour of our death. The murmuring a medicine: And blessed is the fruit of thywombjesus. Until, at the end of each decade, the women paused for a moment, allowing themselves a collective breath before opening their mouths to begin again.
Mythology
NOW COMES THE SOUND, soft and thumping as a human heart. Who can say whether its source is the teacher as he walks around the classroom tapping the eraser of his pencil against the palm of his hand, or whether the sound comes, as it often does, from the classroom next door?
The teacher one class over has a full-blown crush on the state of Hawaii. He wears shirts covered in hibiscus and returns from school breaks with brown skin and a stack of records he uses to teach the girls in his class how to hula. The sound of drumming slips under the door and into our classroom so that a sway sometimes starts up in my hips. I imagine his girls learning to move their bodies like palm trees in the breeze, and only when I’m safely home do I allow myself to replay the music in my head while turning my hands into birds and watching them take flight.
There’s no dancing in our classroom, no red-hot hibiscus, no coconut-scented oil. There is only Mr. Coyle, whose plain dress shirts are topped with ties so short they become stubby arrows pointing to his fleshy midsection, ties that give him the look of a father from a television sitcom—the sort who might have an outburst here or there, but who means well and must rely on his TV wife to set him straight. Rachel Zaso says Mr. Coyle is Italian because his last name ends in a vowel. Rachel wants everyone to be Italian and she’s my best friend in the class, so I indulge her—though I wonder why the e in Coyle doesn’t bounce like the vowels in Travolta and Bertinelli or Savoia, the pastry shop a few blocks away from No. 33 School.
Rachel sits in front of me, her ponytail so tight it pulls at the edges of her eyes. Next to her is Tammy Dinkins—and how to account for Tammy, whose father is black and mother is Italian but whose last name ends in s? And what of my own last name, which ends in a full-stop n and has nothing to do with who I am? Still, I like rules, especially those geared toward the unlocking and understanding of people, so I consider once again what Rachel has said about vowels; is it possible that this is all that remains of sixth grade?
But no, here comes the teacher, his shoes making soft contact with the floor. Arms folded, pencil moving against his hand as he surveys the classroom. He stops from time to time, bending into the flat carpet to remove a scrap of paper or to neaten a pile of books stacked along the wall of windows. Our desks are joined into long rows and we sit, girls and boys contemplating the rectangles of lined paper before us.
When he nears my row and stops tapping, I turn pink and pick up my own pencil, as if I have just that second thought of something to write. The truth is that I’ve been racking my brain since he gave the assignment and now it’s too late. He’s in front of me and leaning into my blank page as if checking to see if the words have been written in the very faintest shade of lead.
“How’s it going?” His question is gentle but I slink under its weight. I’m the one whose work is normally done while he circulates around the room, offering a thumbs-up or encouraging comments to those who have trouble starting. But now it’s as if someone has taken up the classroom globe and spun it hard, leaving me to lurch inside the circle of it, treading the hollow places under the mountain ranges of Central Europe.
The assignment is to write what we want to be someday. One of the most regular questions of childhood, yet it seems I’ve never been asked it. Maybe because I’m one of seven kids in a family headed by a woman without a husband or a career and we live in a neighborhood brimming with similar women, people who did not plan as children to wait tables or clean hotel rooms or stand around on porches and corners, watching as the world passes. Maybe no one asks because I seem to have it all figured out. I do well in school, where answers to questions about the Thirteen Colonies and the Nile River basin sit like easy treasure inside textbooks. School problems are a universe unto themselves, and I can always be counted on to be the girl with the right answer. But this question stops me. This question whose answer lies in the murky world beyond the classroom.
Besides having children and a job sure to tire her out, one that might eventually give her varicose veins from standing while binding books like my best friend Angie’s mother, I’ve no clue what else a woman might do. I think of Jodi Webber, a girl in my class whose mother drives a pantyhose truck, the way, every morning, Jodi emerges from a van with women’s legs painted to its side. I try a quick survey of TV characters for ideas about what women do beyond caring for their families and when nothing comes, I think of my own mother who has worked in factories and shop floors and in the basement of Rochester General Hospital scrubbing down surgical trays. Though she seems grateful for work and tries to make it sound like an adventure, I know she never wanted such jobs, but one thing led to another and there she was, spraying off scalpels and suction devices. I think of the few fathers I know, men with better versions of the same jobs, then consider the most well off families, people who left the neighborhood after landing production jobs at Kodak or Rochester Products—but even with the steady paychecks and annual bonuses allowing them to finance houses in the western suburbs, I understand that these are not the careers we are meant to write.
I look at the back of Rachel Zaso’s head, her ponytail moving as she writes, and wish for the first time I could steal another person’s answer. If I were in the class next door I’d write hula dancer as my career goal and the teacher would stand beside me in his tropical shirt and pat my head with a sun-spotted hand, something blooming in me under such a touch.
But that’s next door. In our classroom, Mr. Coyle shifts his weight, the second vowel of his last name waving like a silent flag as he once again begins to strum a pencil against his hand. Think of what you most enjoy, he’d advised earlier, but my mind swirls with questions about why some vowels bounce while others don’t and how sweet the air surrounding Savoia’s on Saturday—then it comes to me. What I most enjoy is checking out books from the Sully Branch Library, taking them home and reading them under a tent made of my blanket and knees. I’m partial to mysteries and travel books but can’t get enough Greek mythology. The thrill of Athena bursting out of her father’s head, the fully clothed answer to a headache. The story of the nymph so in love with Apollo she sits staring into the sun until the gods take pity and turn her into a sunflower. Arachne, the over-proud weaver, comparing herself to the gods. I like nothing better than to sit inside my blue blanket tent taking in stories of golden apples and pomegranates and unexpected transformations. So far removed from anything I know, but familiar too, the unpredictability of the gods and the longing of mortals. And just like that, I make up my mind about my career: mythologist.
I’ve never heard of the job before, but I remember what Mr.
Coyle said—You can do anything; don’t limit yourselves—and write it down. It looks good on the page, the way it ends in -ologist, like something a person might need to go to college to study. I check the spelling and prepare myself for the shine in Mr. Coyle’s face, the one that comes when he takes my paper and holds it up as an example to the rest of the class, the pain of so many eyes on me mingled with the thrill of having my work publicly praised. When I’m finally prepared for the terrible and wondrous flare of attention, I look up. Only instead of shine, there’s something new in Mr. Coyle’s face.
His eyes are a thick squint. He’s removed his glasses and rubs his lids, as if the entire state of Hawaii with all its sun has come into the room and blinded him temporarily. He tilts his head then straightens himself with a jerk, the way people do when falling in dreams. Mr. Coyle does not touch my paper, does not lift it to the class, saying, “Listen to this, boys and girls.” He only returns his glasses to his face and says, Well, now, that’s a new one. He smiles, but the way he says it, his surprise—Well, now—tells me that mythology is no kind of career. People must find something better with which to occupy their time than stories of girls who slip into the undersides of meadows while gathering poppies and don’t know enough to keep from eating sugared-up pomegranate seeds.
I listen as other kids take turns reading their answers, voices trumpeting intentions to be fashion models, astronauts, the next Michael Jackson. Their goals sound impossible, but must be correct because they include no job anyone I know has ever done.
You can do anything.
Mr. Coyle does not teach us to hula nor wear shirts teeming with exotic flowers, but drives a bright green Volkswagen bug and even beeps at us sometimes. He’s strict—too strict, some say—but while I enjoy all the reading he assigns and the occasional games of Heads-Up, Seven-Up, it’s the easy order of his class that lets me love my time there.
But saying we can do anything? It seems too large to be true, too wide to pin down. I cover the word mythologist with a hand and listen to other kids read their goals, trying my best to think of another career—something beyond the study of hula music, long-gone goddesses, and the tender cycling of the world.
Capias
HERE SHE COMES NOW, la novia, the bride, and how everyone turns to stare.
My God, mira su traje, look at the sight of her gown, and que hermosa, how lovely, as she points a satin shoe in our direction and steps into view, this bride from thirty years gone by. She’ll have children by now, our bride, grandchildren perhaps. But not yet. Not in this moment, where she stands before the altar, a line of saints watching from beneath the panel of stained glass. Her back is to us, pearls running down the length of her gown, train puddled at her feet, the runner like snow upon the aisle, girls in chiffon dresses at her side.
She’s skinny, this bride, her bronzed clavicles making knives just under the lace—but this is a wedding and everything swells with the day so that her body ripens as she stands before us. She was always pretty with her pocketful of sharp features, but on this day light shows in her face as she walks down the center aisle of Corpus Christi and stands before the padre, whose Spanish has never been perfected but whose kindness burns in his wide Irish face. And ay Dios mío, look at the groom—compact and good-looking, tux and new shoes, the whole of him decked out in white, the way men used to do—the way he nearly bursts with pride as she reaches his side, then as he fades away, becoming nothing so much as the spray of baby’s breath in his pocket until only she remains. It’s the bride we look for anyway. When wedding parties emerge from the churches—the flash of white—there she is, we say, something starting in us.
The bride, I say, oh look! I’ve seen her beside the pink chapel in midtown Memphis, under the lilacs at Highland Park and gathering jasmine in the garden of the Alcázar in Sevilla. The bride. An ordinary woman making silk of just one day—the beginning, like all beginnings, belonging to more than just herself.
But back to our bride, la novia tan hermosa, and the way she lets go of her flowers in the church hall after Mass. The way she dances with her new groom—a slow song, something rising between them, burning beneath the satin, but not so much that she can’t stand to dance with her father and the line of other men who slip folded bills into the purse tied to her waist. It’s 1980 in western New York; there’s nothing shameful about a dollar dance. All we see is how well she dances, the way she becomes a sweep of lace with every turn, each man taken in for a few seconds then spun away as the next arrives.
Now she’s dancing with someone from the band, the conga player, or the singer who holds the güiro in one hand, the metal púa in the other, making the sounds that the body knows better than words. Everyone joins the dance. Children wiggle narrow hips between chugs of cold maltas and sips of piña coladas. These are Puerto Rican families, salsas and merengues are as natural as bottles of rum and the bride’s basket of capias—wedding favors made by her mother and her sisters, charms surrounded by bits of satin and tulle, miniature corsages bearing the couples’ names and wedding date.
Our bride takes a break and carries her capias in a basket, pinning one to each female guest, bending into ladies too old to rise, viejas, kissing them once on the cheek, Bendición, asking for a blessing and giving another kiss at their reply, Que Dios te bendiga, mi niña (May God bless you, my child).
She moves on, the number of capias dwindling as she approaches—but what’s this, a white child at her wedding? Other than the priest who’s already returned to the rectory, the girl is the only blanca in the crowd. Oh yes, she recognizes her now, the one always with the Rosas girls—Wandi and Sari and Maritza. We both wonder whether she should pin one to me, this girl who has somehow landed at her reception, but here it comes, a bit of lace stuck to my dress, just enough to comprehend some of what it means to be a bride, the lightness and grace, the moment suspended, a respite from the daily business of living, if only for a few hours. La novia, not so much a person as a condition, wrapped in white and handing out favors. What does she say as she pins it? I’m not old enough to be asked to give a blessing, not fluent enough to ask to receive one. She probably says thank you for coming, and maybe I know enough to mumble congratulations as I touch the bit of plumage from her basket.
We stand together, a strange child at a wedding and a bride with her basket of capias. How fast it will go, thirty years. The gown gone ivory, the rasp of güiro fading into the hum of tree frogs. But not yet.
Let us stay a little longer in the basement of Corpus Christi Church, for the beer and the pasteles, and the sound of the band starting up. This time it’s an old song and the viejas sigh while I let my fingers leave the capia pinned to my dress and run to find my friends and beg a share of cake. The day is still before us, and ay, Dios mío, what a beautiful bride, and yes, que todos estamos bendecidos—we are, each of us, in this moment, blessed.
The Last American Virgin
IN MY MEMORY, THE virgin is French. Halo of dark curls, mouth the color of pomegranate, as if those from an Old World fresco. Or maybe she only seemed French because of the way, in those days, the word itself was salacious—something to do with the body, a special kind of kissing, frenching, people called it. The word belonged to me more than my sisters. We each had different fathers and mine’s last name was DesJardin; his Frenchness was one of the few details my mother revealed—that, and his two-timing—so that the concept of French was further tainted by its connection to him. Later, I’d learn to like the language that sounded like a mouth swollen with delicious things, but back then, French was a way to talk dirty, like the time my mother got a whiff of the perfume I’d spritzed on my pink velour blouse while at Angie VanEpps’s house. “My God,” she said. “You smell like a French whore.”
But back to the virgin. It turns out that I was wrong about her being French. I’d run two films together: Diane Franklin, the actress from the 1982 film The Last American Virgin, played a French exchange student in another teen romance a few years lat
er. The two roles collided inside my head, so that she was also French as the virgin, all dewy eyes and red cushion mouth as she arrives at her new school and becomes the target of the bad boy—the one who will use her and toss her aside, the one she cannot help but fall for, surrendering her virginity and becoming pregnant in one fell swoop. Of course, she’s ditched. But all is not lost. There’s another boy waiting in the wings, one who’s loved her from afar, one who sells his stereo equipment to pay for the procedure, the one who brings her to the clinic, presenting her with a bag of oranges after the abortion—so that to me, in 1982, the giving of oranges became the most generous expression of love.
A body becomes what it holds. When it carries a baby the body becomes a mother. When it clings to desire the body makes itself into a tooth. My body carried what it learned in middle school classes—the proper use of prepositions, the Three-Fifths Compromise, a series of facts about internal organs. The heart is the size of a clenched fist; situated between the lungs, it pumps thousands of gallons of blood per day. In 1982 I was a color-coded diagram of left and right ventricles and inferior vena cava.
Even our school was named for the body: Corpus Christi—Body of Christ in Latin. Our colors were white and red, for the body and the blood. Though the school shared a parking lot with the church of the same name, the parish no longer supported the school, and except for the few of us who crossed the parking lot for Holy Day Masses, the school seemed Catholic in name only. Situated between neighborhoods where poverty and teen pregnancy loomed larger than any catechism, crucifixes may have been affixed to walls or a cracked plaster Virgin pushed into the corner of a classroom, but kids came to Corpus regardless of religious background or parish affiliation. Theology class shared time with sex education, so that we learned about the workings of the fallopian tubes after studying the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in heart: for they will see God, followed by the epithelium is covered with cilia that beat continuously toward the uterus.
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