Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  “Look, Andrea,” I said. “I’m assuming you’ve got enough sense to be using birth control.”

  She gave her eyes a long, exaggerated roll. “Haven’t we had this conversation, like, six hundred times?”

  “Yes,” I said pointedly.

  “I’m not a moron. You think I can’t learn from my sister’s mistakes?” She stroked her neck absently, darkening a hickey I’d just noticed at the top of her collarbone. “There hasn’t been one single solitary minute of silence in that nuthouse since the second her kids were born. They’re always howling and yowling, either they fell down, or they dropped a cookie, or somebody had the nerve to say ‘no’ when they tried to put the dog in the hamper.” She looked at me. “I guess your nerves kind of short-circuit after a while, because she doesn’t even hear it anymore. Or maybe she’s just gone deaf—as a whaddyacallit, defense mechanism.”

  “Which is the long way of saying you do use birth control?”

  Andrea pursed her used-looking lips. “Usually. It’s kind of a pain.” She swiveled her head toward her house.

  “I’ll walk you in,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Andrea, I’ve been in your house before.”

  She hesitated, then got out; we had to step over the bumper of her mother’s car to get to the steps, keeping one hand on the hood. The rain had stopped altogether, leaving a greasy film over everything in the yard.

  Mrs. Harmon grunted when Andrea crowded through the too-small kitchen door. She was making a potholder at the kitchen table, on which rested a year’s worth of newspapers and a portable TV broadcasting a middle-of-the-night infomercial for a hair-removal system. She looked up and saw me. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I brought your daughter home, Mrs. Harmon,” I said. I had to shout a little over the TV and a lot over the dog, who was yapping psychotically, jouncing side to side. Cat-sized, with a dirty muzzle and hardly any tail, he jounced and yapped: Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark!

  “I suppose this is my fault?” Mrs. Harmon yelled. Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark! “This is all my fault, right? My daughter trots her backside all over two counties and you figure out a way it’s my fault, right?” Her swimmy eyes bulged; she pointed a crochet hook with an alcoholic’s self-righteous bravado. On my previous occasions here she’d been sober and edgy, quoting accurately from the state’s toothless truancy code. I decided I preferred her drunk.

  “Ma! “Andrea hollered. “Ma, shut up!”

  Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark!

  Mrs. Harmon teetered in my direction, her boxy figure taking all the space between the refrigerator and the stove. There were so many pots and pans—clean ones, incongruously shiny—stored on the stove top that you couldn’t see any of the burners. The place smelled faintly of propane. “You people keep your nose stuck out of my business, why don’t you,” Mrs. Harmon said. She’d been drinking long enough that her voice could rise only so far, for which I was grateful. The dog was springing up and down, but not toward me, more like a jack-in-the-box, stuck in a witless boomerang. “If you people had kids of your own” she added “you wouldn’t be so stick-your-nose about mine.”

  The dog kept at it, a persistent pitch that lodged just behind my eyes and grew nails. “Your daughter is a tenth-grader, Mrs. Harmon,” I said irritably. “It’s twelve-thirty in the morning.”

  “Aren’t you one to talk,” she said. “Aren’t you a fine and dandy one to talk.” She grabbed two pans from the stove and banged them at the dog, who turned tail for about a fifth of a second, then resumed barking. Andrea scooped him up, and he finally stopped. For a moment we all stood there, blinking in the silence.

  “Ma, will you just shut up?” Andrea lumbered to her room, a long groan trailing her as she picked her way through hillocks of laundry, the dog tucked mutely under her arm. Her door slammed with a cardboard-sounding clunk.

  “At some point,” I stammered, “at a more appropriate time, Mrs. Harmon—“As a rule, I didn’t like to confront parents; they either blew up or shriveled before your eyes and neither scenario made for sunny times. Mrs. Harmon didn’t say anything, so I added, quietly,” Andrea’s a bright girl, Mrs. Harmon, but she’s barely—”

  “Who do you think you are, telling me how to raise my kid?” she snarled. “You think I don’t know you got tried out by a priest?”

  I was so stunned that my ears rang. I started to speak, but the saliva caught in my windpipe and I began to cough, first lightly, hic-hic-hic, then hard, helpless. Mrs. Harmon waded through a cymbal-crash of fallen cookware, yelling, “Andrea get out here your teacher’s about to croak,” and there was Andrea appearing out of nowhere, hammering on my back with her bony fist, rejuvenating my healed wounds and releasing spirals of pain as the TV show droned in the background and the dog resumed its electroshock barking and a glass of water was thrust into my hands and I stopped coughing and the room righted itself and I found myself outside again, climbing back over the bumper of the Harmons’ low-hipped car as the barking came to a stunning, merciful stop.

  “She wasn’t this bad before my father left,” Andrea said. She stood in the open doorway, her silhouette wiry, tough, rigid, mitigated by the frizzy outline of the dog hanging purselike over her arm. “It’s my father’s fault I’m turning out like this.”

  “Get some sleep,” I told her. “We’ll talk on Monday.”

  “Okey-dokey,” she chirped. “We’ll talk on Monday.”

  “Andrea,” I said, turning into the dark. “You mean something to me.”

  The house blazed behind her, but her face consisted only of shadow. I believe I saw her eyes move. “Oh,” she said, then slipped inside, the door catching so quietly that a moment passed before I understood she was gone.

  By the time I got home I had bitten my lips nearly numb. Drew came out of his studio and studied me.

  “I had a dustup with Gwen Harmon,” I told him.

  He was pulling off my coat. “I told you not to go.”

  “I wish I hadn’t. She said something really hateful.”

  “You want a bath? I’ll run you a bath.”

  “I don’t want a bath. I want a gun.”

  We looked at each other, time stretched briefly, and we laughed a little, another one of those connecting moments.

  “I want you to go back to that counselor,” he said.

  “I will. I know.” I kicked off my shoes and sloshed into the living room, Drew trailing me.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Anyone would be a little at sea.”

  He was trying to help me. I let him hold me for a while as if I were any ordinary wife. Then, after a long silence in which I felt his body adjust and readjust against mine, his voice re-emerged from the muted dark. “People have things, Lizzy,” he said. “Things that kill them a little. They find ways to keep going”

  I nodded, my face resting on his chest. “Were you going to leave me?” I asked him. I tried to imagine a woman Drew might leave me for, but came up empty, just a dim, see-through figure, weightless and floating, nothing real.

  “I don’t know,” he said. His shirt smelled like us. “I was thinking about it.”

  “Are you thinking about it now?”

  “What kind of man would leave you now?” His breath warmed my temple. “What kind of man would I be?”

  As dislocating as it was to stand in my house with this man who wanted to leave but wouldn’t, I didn’t push him any further. I did not want to be the kind of woman who got left.

  “You coming up?”

  “In a minute,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

  We extricated ourselves—awkwardly, it seemed. I followed him only so far; he paused on the stair, but maybe he saw in my face that now was not the moment if he cared to seize one.

  I was on my way upstairs, I believe I was on my way upstairs, but instead I fitted myself into the double chair and wrapped myself in the throw Mrs. Blanchard had given us for our wedding. It shimmered with wh
ite flowers.

  I turned off the lights and sat in the dark, trying to conjure the feeling of angels’ wings near my hospital bed, the flash of ring. The weightless woman Drew might have left me for vanished utterly, replaced by the more tangible specter of a black sleeve, a freckled hand marked with downy red hairs, a hand that looked as if it might actually weigh something, a ring so real it took the color of earth itself.

  The Little Hours

  SEXT

  TWELVE

  From The Liturgy of the Hours:

  My soul yearns for you in the night;

  yes, my spirit within me keeps vigil for you . . .

  The women in the parish dress up for him. He finds it touching, their lipstick and good shoes, these signs of respect and distance. How endearing, the businesslike way they straighten their skirts across their knees in advance of the inevitable tears, the admission of weakness or guilt, the confession that will make slush of their voices. Their ladylike attire—tiny earrings, small purses swinging on long straps—serves as a kind of disguise, a loophole in case they renege on promises made while wearing these very clothes. Later, stripped of their armor, they can tell themselves, That wasn’t me in there, making their betrayals and inconsistencies easier to bear.

  From the beginning, from his first, mercifully brief assignment as a prison chaplain, he set out to make leaders of the led, shepherds of the sheep. His mission, in the words of the more progressive teachers at Grand Séminaire, was to help his parishioners “find their own priesthood.” He undertook the parable of the loaves and fishes—the first self-help article in recorded history—as the central metaphor of his calling. Now, entrusted with four hundred families in a town he loves, he strives to show his people how to become their own prophets of God’s word, their own keepers of the sacraments. He jokes that he wants to work himself out of a job, to bring them a bit of bread and a gutted trout and watch them multiply the bounty. Cultivate faithful marriages; maintain forthright friendships; pray with your children. Find your own priesthood.

  He tries to make it easy, doling out advice the way he doles out penance after Confession, discrete tasks (on the order of six Hail Marys and four Our Fathers) that appear easy but (in the ideal, at least) nudge the penitent toward reflection and forgiveness:

  Give a sincere compliment to the child who harries you most.

  List three reasons why you married him in the first place.

  When God says no, try to rephrase the question.

  He hopes and believes that his people—the men, too, when they come—leave his office feeling fortified, not judged; renewed, not encumbered; opened, not diminished. Though ill-prepared for the confounding miscellany of human endeavor, he has learned to meet his congregation’s often muted cries with a certain amount of grace and, increasingly, experience.

  He believes he has made a good job of it, discovering on his own that spiritual guidance is often a matter of reassurance. Father, would you bless me? they ask him. His fingers rest on their sheening foreheads. Their faces slacken; it has the effect of a magic spell. How glad he is to have been called to service now, with condemnation out of vogue and compassion in!

  Unlike the other women, Vivienne comes to her appointments simply dressed, in her softened shirts and much-washed jeans, her hair corralled by a brown barrette. How else, in this house they’ve come to jokingly call the “north wing” of her own, might she dress? Even so, when she comes to him for guidance she enters by the front door and steps into the narrow hall like any other parishioner. Her formality both dismays and disarms him. Is she taking care to appear unexceptional because she believes she is an exception, or because she believes she is not?

  He does not yet understand that he has fallen hard in love.

  Wednesday evening. He can hear the girls outside, tending the moon garden in the dusk, nipping spent blossoms with the excellent German-made clippers he gave Lizzy months ago, on her seventh birthday. (Too young! said Mrs. Hanson. C’est beau, ah? said Vivienne.) The baby boys—Buddy just ten months old, a dimpled troll whom Lizzy and Mariette carry around endlessly, their favorite doll—are next door with Pauline. Ray’s gone fishing. Vivienne arrives, cool outside air filling the tiny hallway through which normally enter so many forms of demand: Father, the parking lot needs paving. Father, my mother took a turn for the worse. Father, my son is taking drugs. Vivienne brings something else altogether. Her presence, despite its physical lightness, seems so urgent, so blessedly necessary.

  Drawing her into his office, he opens the whispering door. He runs his hand over the light switch, but it does not take. I’ll have to replace that, he says. Here is a man with no wood shop, no riding lawn mower, no bowling night or shift work, but he has a lightbulb to replace and wants her to know it.

  He crosses to his desk, where he snaps on the lamp Elizabeth bought for him in celebration of his pastorship. The lamp shade shows hummingbirds and lilies floating in thick glass. It casts a quiet, pinkish light. Over the years, so gradually it feels almost like a secret, he has attuned himself to his friend and neighbor with ever-increasing precision. He can recognize her footfall on the porch, the rabbit-quick flick of the knob when she turns it. He knows when she’s been in his garden, certain careful partings amongst the thickets of flowers. When the Blanchards’ car starts up in their driveway a hundred yards away, he senses whether it is she or Ray at the wheel. He can pick out her voice anywhere: her scratched-glass alto in the recessional hymn, her waterfall laughter at a school play; a single word in a grocery line. She is, quite simply, present. All the time.

  And he—who possesses no frame of reference, who depends on God to keep his mission clear, who accepts sexual desire as a path to prayer and psychological strength, whose sister was his only woman friend, whose passion for his child both anchors and terrifies him, who wants no life but the one he’s been given—he names her presence only as a form of relief.

  The certainty in her face, those strong, high bones: relief.

  Her composed elegance, in her customary pew, hymnal opened on her lap: relief.

  The marigolds bordering the moon garden, her recipe for preventing pests: relief.

  Her presumptuous reach into the spice cupboard, a fistful of oregano added to his kettle of pallid spaghetti sauce: relief.

  He endures thoughts of Vivienne as a passed test, a measure of his focus as a man of God and his willingness to renew his vows on a daily basis. He respects his vocation more, not less, because of her. He is proud of his friendship with her and what it asks of him as a mature man with a calling. He believes he has come to embrace its complications.

  Father, she begins.

  We’ve been friends for years, Vivienne. Do you think you could call me Mike?

  I call you Michael in my head, she says. At least, that’s what he thinks she says. He does not ask her to repeat it for fear he heard it wrong. His own head rings. When she speaks again, she calls him Father.

  Tonight, as it happens, is also his own counseling night—once every six weeks he drives up to Bangor to visit with Jack Derocher, his confessor, an older man good at parish work. He talks to Jack about parish demands, his impatience at meetings, his annoyance with the housekeeper. He does not, as he suspects some of his brethren must, discuss doubts about God’s plan or presence. Who can doubt God’s plan or presence with Lizzy in the house? In the face of another unendurable loss, God waltzed Lizzy into this rectory, hung her red coat on the newel post, and let her stay.

  No, he thinks, I’ve got no quarrel with God.

  It’s an arrogant notion, Jack Derocher would say, to believe God selected you for special favors. But he does believe it, and because he does, he cancels his standing appointment. He would rather see Vivienne Blanchard tonight than Jack Derocher. He would rather talk about children, act like a family man, push up his sleeves, work the collar off his chafed neck, talk to a mother. So he switches on the lamp, admiring the pinkish light on Vivienne’s face.

  I let her stay up til
l eleven last night making a leprechaun trap, he says. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut this morning when Mrs. Hanson came in.

  Did you catch one?

  Not yet. Maybe tonight.

  Vivienne smiles. Children love to stay up late, she tells him.

  I can’t seem to put my foot down, Vivienne.

  Oh, so! she scoffs. She has all her life for people who put their foot down. You go ahead. You keep your foot right where it is.

  This is what she says to him, all the time: You go ahead.

  He is not without friends. But Vivienne is the only person he knows who appears to believe he is really a parent. He shows her the trap, a shoe box decorated with crepe paper and green glitter. Her head bobs a little, her hair shivers in the light.

  Vivienne inspects the leprechaun trap, then puts it down, turning suddenly formal, distant. I wish to talk about Ray, she says. I have nowhere else to turn. I require advice.

  Something curdles within him. He waits. He does not yet know that he will come to her house one night and find her eye blackened, but the foreknowledge resides in his head already, for he expects her to say something about violence.

  Instead, she comes up with the words “marital intimacy.” The term fills him with dread, though Vivienne is not the first woman to confide in him this way. He has talked about this with his brother priests. How do we advise wives and husbands? We, with the experience of eunuchs! We’re choirboys! Poulin booms over a card game, throwing back his head and showing his fillings. Choirboys masquerading as grown-ups! He laughs, slapping the table, four aces, no doubt, quivering in the opposite hand; he laughs when winning.

  We know plenty about commitment, Leary likes to retort, defensive and (few people know) thinking about “jumping the league,” Jack Derocher’s words for leaving the priesthood.