by Robbi McCoy
“Oh, God! I’d forgotten. Thankfully.”
Danny stuck a finger in his mouth and gagged.
After clearing the breakfast table, Harper waited for everyone to be ready to launch, vaguely looking at familiar family photographs in the hallway. There were pictures of all of them— baby pictures, school pictures, family group pictures and photos of ancient relatives she had never known. Her mother’s cardboard-and-felt family tree also hung here, peppered all over with tiny photographs of people’s faces with names pasted under them. Heading it up was a dour-looking couple—shadowy Irish ancestors. Then the branches spread, a widening pattern of names, a tangle of relationships, leading sometimes nowhere, but eventually to her own grandparents, parents and siblings, people connected to her with red yarn. Her great-grandparents, the Harpers of Connecticut, had immigrated as adults, but her grandparents were American-born. The Harpers were destitute farmers in Ireland, but prosperous farmers in New England. Their life had not been too difficult, not unreasonably so, and their children were well-off and had moved away from toiling in the dirt. Strife had not appreciably touched the family since they had arrived in the New World.
Positioned under these Connecticut Harpers were Alice Caitlin Harper and her Boston-born husband, John William Sheridan. Their three offspring were lined up on a lower tier. Beside Neil, his wife Kathy. Under them, three children. Under Harper, dead space. There is something wrong with a perspective that implies that your only contribution can be children, thought Harper. The space under her name suggested more than death of a lineage. It suggested failure, incompetence and disappointment. She had never liked this cardboard monstrosity, and today she liked it even less.
It might be a tremendous disappointment to her mother, she realized, that she didn’t have children. She didn’t see herself as the maternal type. It wasn’t really a choice she had made, not consciously. But then, she didn’t think that Alice Caitlin Harper had chosen her spot in this scheme either. Like so many women of her generation, Alice had had her role thrust upon her by circumstances. She had passively accepted what she stumbled into. Alice was a doggedly sensible woman with native intelligence, unhoned and unembellished. If she had made a plan for her life, Harper didn’t know about it, and it had obviously been set aside at age eighteen when she married John Sheridan.
This chart, then, which looked like there was a consciousness behind it because of all of the orderly connections, was ultimately designed by chance, she decided, like the lives of all of its individual members. There was only an illusion of control—strings of red yarn.
People talk about making plans, Harper thought, but, in the end, most of the decisions they make are made within the context of countless arbitrary movements of particles through space.
Her mother wouldn’t subscribe to this point of view, she knew. She believed that there was a master plan, God’s master plan, regardless of how convoluted and directionless it appeared. Harper had believed in the master plan long ago, but, because of her father, had modified it to fall in line with the laws of physics, as if God and physics were one and the same thing. To her father, they were, of course. All of the mysteries, all of the unknowns were just experiments waiting to be conducted by scientists. Harper embraced the mysteries too. She just had no inclination to solve them. She was open to the answers, and she was willing to accept explanations other than physics and other than God, even though she couldn’t guess what else might offer up such explanations.
At last the men were ready. The three of them loaded into the boat and pushed off onto the lake. Harper sat astern, wearing dark glasses and a wide sun hat. Under a loose beach coat, she wore a one-piece bathing suit. Her father took the steering wheel. Danny started the motor. Soon they were gliding across the water, just as they had done twenty years before as children. The back of her father’s head had changed, though. Wisps of gray hair now blew in the wind while the sunlight glistened on his shiny bald head. But everything else was the same. The shoreline of the lake was familiar, and its couple of small islands reminded Harper of many happy days of youthful play.
Speeding across the lake with her father at the helm and her brother sitting opposite, it took no great leap of imagination for Harper to think of herself as eleven years old again. It was all here, complete and comfortable. Mom was home fussing in the kitchen. When they returned, she would greet them with food.
“How’s this?” her father asked, cutting the engine.
The boat drifted offshore from a grass-covered island. “Great,” Danny said, leaning over to get his fishing pole. “I remember once catching a black bass right here that was almost as tall as me.”
“You were a mighty short kid, it’s true,” their father said, smiling affectionately.
For the next couple of hours, they cast out in three different directions and tended their silent poles. While waiting for a strike, Harper read Sor Juana by Octavio Paz, a book she’d gotten from the local library the day after her arrival. She had wanted to read it for a long time and was thoroughly engrossed in the story.
She always had a book going, sometimes more than one, frequently biographies or some nonfiction tale about someone like this, an artist, a revolutionary of some kind, a hero who would appeal to a modern woman. She did not read fiction, except on occasion when a novel was recommended by someone she admired.
“What’s the book about?” Danny asked.
“Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun who became a self-taught scholar and important feminist writer. She was bold and astonishing, especially for the time.”
“Really?” he replied. “You’re reading a book about a nun?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard about her. What did you study at that seminary anyway?”
“Christian theology,” announced Danny, sticking his nose in the air. “That is the study of hypocrisy, misogyny and jingoism at work throughout the Anno Domini part of the history of mankind, and I emphasize man-kind.”
“That place really turned you against the Church, didn’t it?”
He nodded. “The whole system is just so archaic. The Church is its own worst enemy. Your nun there was probably held back from serving the church in her full capacity in the same way women are today. Or gay men. Or men who want to have sex, for Christ’s sake!”
“Stop right there,” their father said firmly. “I will not have you debating the ordination of women and gay men in my boat. This boat is not a forum for religious discussion. This boat is a safe zone.”
Harper and Danny both stared at their father.
“No religion, no politics,” he continued. “Talk about the weather.”
“Weather, huh?” Danny said, looking mischievous. “Well, the climate at the Vatican—”
The look of warning he got from his father made him stop short and keep his thought to himself.
“Geez,” Harper whispered to Danny, “he really takes retirement seriously.”
She returned to her book and read silently until lunch. Afterward, she drowsed, her hat over her face and beach coat discarded, reclining against a foam cushion. The voices of her father and brother came in snatches—talk of fishing strategies, Danny’s half-hearted job hunting, local characters that Harper didn’t know. Her father’s Boston accent was a soothing lullaby, mingling with the soft patter of water lapping against the sides of the boat.
When she got too warm, she dove into the water to cool off.
“You’re scaring the fish,” Danny complained as she resurfaced.
“For the last three hours I haven’t been scaring them,” she called. “I can’t see it makes much difference.”
She swam over to the island and crawled out of the water and up the grassy slope to the highest point. She’d been here before. She’d dubbed this rock Mount Olympus years ago and had considered it her own personal promontory. The grass-covered island was no more than fifty feet across and about twice that distance away from a larger island. Sitting at its pinnacle,
she looked out across the lake, seeing only one other boat in the distance. The breeze was light and warm today. The water shimmered under the summer sun. A day like this must have been the happiest of her childhood, she decided, a day when she could feel the sun on her bare skin and lose all sense of time. She lay on the grass, closing her eyes. The breeze on her wet suit chilled her slightly, but soon her skin grew warm again.
She used to imagine herself as Zeus, throwing down thunderbolts from this rock. The Greek myths had entertained her through a good many years of her childhood. She loved the stories, all those jealous gods and their meddlesome schemes. They were so much more captivating than the Bible stories she had been expected to know. Mary and Joseph were incredibly dull compared to Hera and Zeus. Harper’s father had given her a huge book titled The Greek Myths, an exhaustive collection with richly colored drawings. Even now when she recalled one of the myths, she often saw in her mind the illustration from that book, like the tender, wan face of Narcissus looking lovingly up at himself from a watery reflection.
Athena was her favorite of the gods. She was the goddess of wisdom, the virgin warrior. The idea that Athena had no lovers had appealed to Harper when she was young. She had resolved at an early age herself to have no lovers because that was how she knew she could be an independent woman. In fact, she had spent many hours in fantasies in which she sat upon plush cushions in a flowing white robe, entertained by a eunuch with a golden lyre, greeting handsome suitors with the phrase, “I shall take no lover, despite your pretty face.”
If she had been born in an earlier time, she might have had to stick to that resolution, Harper realized. She might have had to become a nun. She had been born at the height of the sexual revolution, however, and the women’s liberation movement. She had inherited the right to be independent and to have lovers, as many as she liked, and none of them could subdue her wanderlust unless she wished it.
So far, she didn’t wish it. Harper didn’t think it was a coincidence that in myth and legend so many women of achievement were either virgins or extremely promiscuous, taking lovers as it pleased them, to touch their bodies, but never their hearts. Eliot, the one lover who had managed to carve out a long-term spot for himself in her life, was getting harder to deter, pressuring her with his continuing hints that they should “settle down” together. She didn’t like it. I shall have to turn him into a boar, she mused, casting herself again in the role of Olympian. He really is such a boor.
Chapter 7
SUMMER, THIRTEEN YEARS AGO
Sister Josephina, wearing a gray skirt, white blouse and milky-colored stockings, was running the length of the soccer field, kicking a ball ahead of her toward the goal. The sight of her tall, lanky frame speeding down the field in that inappropriate costume was hilarious. The children, most of whom were half her height, were running after her and laughing hysterically at the same time.
Harper was supervising the unloading of a truck piled high with bags of cement mix and two-by-fours. From her vantage point at the side of the school building, she had a first-rate view of the soccer field. Across the dusty street, in front of a small house, four-year-old Mia sat on a stool while her mother cut her hair. Periodically, Mia would let out a horrible cry of pain, as if her mother were cutting off her ears.
Harper showed the truck driver and his helper where to stack the cement bags, then turned her attention back to the soccer game. Sister Jo gave the ball a powerful kick toward the goalie, then lost her balance and fell backwards, landing on her rear end. The kids gathered around and helped her to her feet. Harper, seeing that Sister Jo was laughing and apparently unharmed, burst into laughter herself.
Sister Jo came trotting over to Harper, leaving the children to carry on without her. She was out of breath and flushed. As usual, her whole face was smiling—ruddy cheeks, thick-lashed brown eyes and of course her mouth, which was stretched across the width of her face.
In the two months that Harper had been in La Serena, she had become dear friends with Sister Josephina, working at her side, infected with her sense of purpose. Sister Jo was originally from Arizona. An American-born child of Mexican immigrants, she left her family’s home after high school and went directly into a religious order. She graduated from college while still in the U.S. and eventually took an assignment in Oaxaca. She had served there for almost twenty years, battling poverty and disease in the small villages along the western coast of southern Mexico. The Catholic church in La Serena, presided over by Father Gabriel, had been her home for over ten years. At the present, there were no other sisters there, but there had been others from time to time.
La Serena, a village of a few hundred people, had been nearly destroyed by a hurricane the previous fall. Harper had learned of this through her brother Danny, whose church had been collecting donations of blankets, clothes and other supplies to send to the affected area. When she had expressed an interest in helping, Danny had asked if she wanted to donate money.
“Is there something else I could do?” she had asked him. “Something more personal?”
“Well, we are sending teams down there to work, to rebuild. Would you want to do something like that? Really dig right into the muck?”
“I would love to do that,” she said. So she had called Eliot to persuade him to change their summer plans, a camping trip with his parents.
“What are you talking about, Harper?” he asked. “We’re going camping.”
“Yes, I know, but we can go camping any time. Come on, Eliot. It will be fun.”
“Oh, I don’t know. This sounds like one of those cockamamie ideas that—”
“Eliot, please. I really want to do this.”
“Why, Harper? Why do you really want to do it?”
“Because it would be something useful. It would help people. All those people, they don’t have homes or enough to eat or anything. So we give up a few weeks of our summer. It would be for such a good cause.”
After a hesitation and a deep sigh, Eliot said, “Okay.”
And so they had traveled to La Serena for a three-week tour of duty, during which they mixed cement in wheelbarrows and hammered together walls and roofs, helping to rebuild a community. The schoolhouse, beside which she now stood, had come up from nothing but a concrete slab during her stay here. She felt a particularly personal sense of accomplishment in this simple whitewashed building. It wasn’t finished yet, but it would be, in just a few weeks. She imagined with satisfaction the day that they would ring the school bell for the first day of class and, after a disruption of almost a year, the village children would resume their educations.
“Oh, my!” Sister Jo said, stopping beside Harper. “I’ve had enough of that for one day.”
“It’s too hot to be out there running around,” Harper said. “Especially in that outfit.”
“I’ve got to admit that you do look a lot more comfortable.”
Harper was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She handed her water bottle to Sister Jo, who sucked it dry without a shred of decorum.
Little Mia let out another scream, whereupon Sister Jo glanced over and waved at her.
“I’m going to run over to the church to get some money for these guys,” Harper said, nodding toward the truck driver. “Can you tell them I’ll just be a minute?”
Sister Jo stepped over to the delivery truck and began speaking in Spanish to the driver while Harper ran across a dirt road to the small Catholic church that served as headquarters for pretty much everything in this village. She unlocked the cash drawer in the office and counted out the exact number of pesos on the bill of sale, then added a few extra for the driver and his helper.
After the rest of the volunteers had gone back home, she had begun to take on more of an administrative role here, helping Sister Jo and Father Gabriel run the construction projects, keep the books and distribute clothing and food to the villagers. She was also helping to stock and organize a small lending library, a project she had initiated.
&nbs
p; Remembering Eliot’s departure, Harper felt a momentary twinge of guilt. It hadn’t been easy to explain to him why she was staying.
“I love it here,” she had told him. “I feel so alive. There’s so much to do.”
“Well, I can’t stay. My parents are having a big anniversary party. I have to be there.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to stay. I’ll stay alone.”
“Harper, are you sure? This is so impulsive. I don’t understand what you’re drawn to here.”
As always, it was hard for her to put into words what she simply felt. But Eliot deserved some sort of explanation. “When I look at Sister Jo, I see a woman who embodies what I want out of life. She really inspires me. I want to be like her.”
“You want to be a nun? Last I heard you didn’t even want to be Catholic.”
“No, no, you aren’t even trying to understand.”
Eliot never did understand. The following day he left with the others to return to the U.S. Two weeks later, he posted a package to her with clothes, some CDs and a few photos he had collected from her house as she had requested.
After paying the deliverymen, Harper and Sister Jo walked together back to the church.
“You know you’re filthy,” Harper said, following the dusty skirt through the church door.
“Nothing a little soap and water won’t take care of.” Passing a stack of cardboard boxes, Sister Jo said, “So, what’s this, then?”
“More books. I got them from a library in Los Angeles. They just arrived.”
“Wonderful.” Sister Jo turned to Harper and took hold of her hand, squeezing it. “You’re a godsend. So much energy. Such a help.”
Harper held tightly to Sister Jo’s hand as they continued through the hallway to the back of the church where the living quarters were located. They parted when Sister Jo went to her room to clean up and Harper went to the kitchen to heat up a pot of beans. She put two bowls on the little wooden table, along with a stack of tortillas.