Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  Drew and I slipped into a back pew. The trifling snowfall had prompted the faithful to don their winter goods, so the church bloomed with the wet-wool smell I associated with winter Masses. The priest was not the hale fellow who’d sold us our first Christmas tree but a man in early old age with nothing of the actor about him. He shouldered through the liturgy in an indifferent monotone, his bald head absorbing the fluorescence of the upgraded fixtures in the sacristy. In my former place, far down the aisle in the front pew, sat a family of redheads with two grinny babies. Behind them, the extended family, also ruddy and carrot-topped, politely inclined their heads for a lugubrious homily that I could not quite make out despite the addition of a microphone, an accoutrement that Father Mike’s honeyed tenor had not required.

  Comparison was unavoidable. The new priest, slope-shouldered and weakly spoken, managed to look smaller than life in his dazzling vestments, like a turtle posing unsuccessfully as a bird. Father Mike had so easily risen to the costume and transformed himself in a dozen intangible ways, understanding that religion was not the same as faith. Religion required a touch of theater even in God’s own house. He had an actor’s voice, high color, and a theological certainty that doubled as charisma. He created an illusion of eye contact with scores of people at once. My uncle’s hands were short and square, but from the altar they appeared long and luminous, lifting the chalice to the soft jangling of bells. There was no explaining the sudden breadth of his shoulders in his immaculate vestments, or the uncommon span of his arms. God’s presence transubstantiated more than bread and wine.

  At the end of every Mass I raced to the sacristy door but never caught sight of the haloed specter who held up the host. Week after week I flung open the door and found no one but my only uncle shrugging off his vestments or adjusting his watch. I suppose this was both a relief and a disappointment.

  Drew and I sat through the Gospel, the sermon, the Offertory—Drew standing, kneeling, and sitting a few beats behind everybody else. I’d forgotten nothing and was glad. At the Sign of Peace, the air eddied as seventy-five people turned to shake a neighbor’s hand.

  “Peace be with you,” I said to my startled husband, holding out my palm.

  He glanced around, saw what was happening, and smiled. “You too.” He kissed me. “Peace.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  After the initial Monday rush, I ducked into Mariette’s room, where she was standing over a granite lab table grading a set of quizzes. Behind her hovered a ten-foot-wide paper mural depicting the universe as seen from, apparently, the Eye of God. Above the speckle of gold that signified Planet Earth was written, in red paint: YOU ARE HERE. LOTSA LUCK.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Home.”

  “Home? I called you like fifty times.”

  “I know I’m sorry We needed the time alone”

  She studied me for a moment. “If you came in here to tell me you guys are splitting up, I swear to God I’ll let the rats out of that cage and command them to go straight for your eyeballs.”

  “We’re not splitting up. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  “You’d better mean it.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Good. Some good news for a change.” She turned once again to her grading.

  “Hey. Are you mad at me?”

  “A little,” she said, refusing to look up. “He meant something to me, in case you forgot.”

  “Who?”

  “Father Mike. Who do you think? He left us, too, you know. My mother, my little brothers. We loved him. And now he gets miraculously resurrected from the dead, and we’re full of questions, and you pick that exact time to disappear for three days.”

  I pulled up a stool. The lab table was pocked with acid burns from experiments gone awry. Mariette’s marking pen moved furiously over some luckless student’s quiz. “My mother drove me nuts all weekend long with questions,” she said, “but what did I know? And Paulie’s pestering me to go back and see the kitty, see the kitty, see the kitty, and in the meantime I’m picturing you on your way to Mexico or South Dakota or the North Pole for the big reunion without a word to the people who might give a damn.”

  I reached out to still her pen, but she resisted my advances.

  “People ask me how you are,” she said, “and I tell them I haven’t the faintest idea.” Now she looked at me. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “Mariette, you know everything about me.”

  “For all I know you’ve found him already and forgot to tell me.”

  “I haven’t even started to look.”

  This seemed to surprise her. “Why not?”

  I thought it over. “Why haven’t you looked for your father once in all these years?”

  “Because some people are better off gone. You spare yourself their excuses. What could my father possibly have to say to me? He left my mother with three kids and half a job.” She marked a quiz and turned it over. “The world is full of missing fathers, Lizzy. They don’t deserve to see us again.”

  Cowed by her anger, I got up and wandered toward a big sign that read DO NOT FEED THE RATS. THEY ARE SERVING A CAUSE FAR NOBLER THAN YOUR MISGUIDED, KNEE-JERK, BUNNY-HUGGING “POLITICS.” The junk-food rats looked pretty good, considering; except for slightly greasy coats they seemed as unfazed by Mariette’s culinary gulag as the rat-food rats.

  “There’s a carrot in the junk-food cage,” I said.

  “Some bleeding-heart keeps slipping them a lifeline.” She set the quizzes down. “Tell me something. Anything.” Her eyes welled. “I don’t even miss you anymore, that’s how long it’s been.”

  A few students had begun to drift into the lab ahead of first bell. Mariette’s homeroom roster comprised fifteen freshly armored sophomores: lipstick newly applied, jackets zipped exactly halfway, caps pulled low over foreheads. Toting a flapping shoulder bag, Andrea Harmon muscled through the door, her neck so mutilated by violet hickeys that she appeared to have survived a hanging. She looked more sullen than usual, shooting me a look I couldn’t quite read. She sat roughly an arm’s length from the junk-food rats, who, incriminatingly, rose on their haunches at the first creak of her jacket against the chair back.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you something,” I said softly. “I met the bad Samaritan.”

  Mariette’s mouth dropped open. “What? How?”

  The students were talking amongst themselves, oblivious of us. I lowered my voice anyway. “He called me here, right after school started. We kind of got to be friends.”

  She squinted at my forehead, as if brain damage could be seen if you stared long enough. “You ‘kind of’ got to be friends?” A couple of the kids looked up, interested. Mariette swept me out of the room and we stood amidst the din of slamming lockers. “How could you not tell me this?” she demanded. “School started over three months ago.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Not even Drew?”

  “Not till a few days ago.”

  “You used to tell me everything first. I’m the best friend. Drew’s just the husband.”

  The bell rang. We had no choice but to surrender to the day’s momentum as the corridor churned with students who, at that moment more than any before or since, felt like fellow hostages—each of us privately held, more or less humanely treated, and unlikely to be released anytime soon.

  Mariette held me by the arm, articulating in the way of a person expressing a dying wish. “Is your whole life a secret?” Then she waded into her room, shouting instructions, readying for another day of cracking open the physical world. It struck me that teaching science to teenagers required enormous, fundamental reserves of hope.

  The computer lab, two doors down from Mariette, was a gloomy, nearly windowless kingdom ruled by a rotating band of unqualified Ed Techs with spotty attendance. The lab was empty but for Wally Tibbetts, a persecuted sophomore whose chief distinguishing feature was a pair of amphibious, pool-blue eyes. Because of our proble
m keeping Ed Techs, Wally had installed himself as the unofficial chargé’ d’affaires. I’d arranged for him to take homeroom here, his sole refuge from H-S Regional’s merciless pecking order. He also took lunch in here, which was strictly forbidden and yet permitted by Rick, who expected public gratitude at such time that Wally collected his Nobel for inventing a brain-chip that allowed idiots to speak instant Japanese.

  “Hey, Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, pausing not at all from his keyboard, which was getting quite a beating. He typed sixty-five words a minute and possessed superior peripheral vision, which is the sort of thing he thought to tell people about himself.

  “I hear you’re the people guy,” I said, raising my voice over the morning announcements crackling through the intercom.

  “That’s me.” He lifted one finger from the keyboard. “What can I do ya for?” Which is really how he talked, like an old-timer sitting on the dusty porch of a general store.

  “I’d like to locate a relative,” I said. “Family reunion coming up.”

  He shoved a pad of paper toward me. “Name, birth date, place of birth, Social Security number if you have it, and I’ll be with you shortly.”

  “Be with me now, Wally,” I said. “It’s shaping up to be a long day.”

  Sighing, he stopped, but did not remove his fingers from the keyboard. He’d had his hair clipped in the quasi-military style the other boys favored, but on Wally it looked less hipster than regulation, as if he were under orders from Uncle Sam.

  “What’s the name?

  “Michael Murphy.” I couldn’t help thinking that Father Mike would have liked a kid like Wally, who stoutly bore the consequences of marching to his differently beating drum.

  “If it was Jebediah Swartzkoff I might be able to help you,” he said. “There’s probably ninety thousand Michael Murphys.”

  “Born on the same day?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I wrote a few notes on the pad, making an effort to steady my hand.

  “Prince Edward Island?” Wally said. “I went there once. It’s really, really green.”

  “He became a citizen at age sixteen,” I said, recalling the story Father Mike trotted out every July Fourth—his sister, my mother, weeping over the Pledge of Allegiance as she stood in the Franklin County courthouse. “But I don’t have a Social Security number.”

  Wally shrugged. “Nobody ever does.”

  “Should I wait?”

  “I’m not that much of a genius.” He checked his watch. “There’s only six more minutes of homeroom. If you get me out of English I can do it first period.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Till fifth period? That’s my study hall. If you could get me out of P.E., second period . . .”

  “I can wait till fifth period, Wally.”

  “All-righty. Don’t hold your breath, though. He’s not a John Smith, but close.”

  “Well, I appreciate the effort.”

  He snapped up the paper and studied it. “No problemo. We had a family reunion once.” He smiled, and it came to me that he’d had his teeth fixed over the summer. That one gray eye-tooth, which had been knocked literally dead by someone like Glen Seavey, now sparkled like the others.

  The morning moved like a fast-acting salve, beginning with two parent meetings and a transcript review, and as the fifth-period bell rang Andrea Harmon stalked into my office, her raccoon eyeliner shiny-wet and poised to spill. She melted into a chair with the poignancy of a dying swan.

  “Dumped,” she said. “Dumped like a month-old pork chop.” She dug into her purse and extracted a matted wad of Kleenex with which she endeavored to mop her eyes. “All of a sudden, like overnight, he’s in love with Julie Dufresne. Little Miss School Spirit herself.” She gave me one of her tree-felling stares. “I suppose you’re happy now. I suppose you’re going to get all I-told-you-so.”

  “Here,” I said, and she allowed me to cup her face and wipe the delicate, blackened skin beneath her eyes, a task made easier by a steady flow of tears. This child who never cried turned out to be a real gusher. She sat there, face red and buckling, for a full ten minutes while I handed her tissue after tissue, marveling at the sometimes unfathomable sources of genuine grief.

  Finally, she pulled herself together, lifted her tear-gummed face. “He wouldn’t wash,” she said. “He’d get all sweaty on purpose, disgusting sweaty, playing pick-up ball or working out on that stupid rowing machine in his parents’ garage, and then he’d pick me up and ride me around somewhere and pull over and ask me to—you know—just to see if I’d still do it.” A few clots of mascara clung to her cried-out lashes. “He said I was boring.” She struggled mightily for composure, her face a KEEP OUT sign made of skin and bone. I offered her another tissue but she refused it.

  “There’s something I’d like to tell you, Andrea,” I said.

  “What,” she said morosely. She crammed a wad of tissue into her purse.

  “When I came to your house that time. You remember? Your mother said something to me that I know you heard.”

  She eyed me calmly. “When you were a kid, that thing that happened.”

  “Except,” I said, “that thing didn’t happen. I wasn’t abused or molested or hurt.”

  She looked surprised, and I realized I must have been speaking louder than I intended to, so I lowered my voice. “My uncle didn’t hurt me, Andrea. He was a normal, nice man with a child to raise.” I paused a moment to really see her, this young woman whose sole source of genuine, unfettered affection came from a six-pound dog. “But what I want to say to you, the thing I want you to know, is this: If he hadn’t been a normal, nice man, if he had done what people accused him of, if he had hurt me, I would have let him.” I leaned closer. “If my uncle, a man I loved, had done any of those things, I would not have protested. I would not have said no. I would have allowed it, Andrea, I would have embraced it, because he was all I had.” I touched her hand, and she let me hold it. “It was just dumb luck that my uncle was a good man. Because I would have loved a bad man just as much.”

  She looked away. “Are you comparing Glen to a pervert?”

  “Andrea,” I said. “I’m comparing you to me.”

  Sometimes in this business you say exactly the right thing, accidentally, at exactly the right time. She took my full measure with what I can only describe as tenderness. “Thank you,” she said, her throat husky from crying. “People say all this stuff about me, you know?”

  I still had her hand. She squeezed mine—faintly enough to deny it if she had to—before hauling up her things and heading back to class.

  I don’t know how long I sat there with my face in my hands. After composing myself, I went to the computer lab and stood at the door, wiping my damp palms on my skirt. “Mrs. Mitchell,” Wally stage-whispered. “I found your guy.”

  “Don’t ask him how,” said Jenny Morton, an anorexic freshman at the adjoining terminal. “You could both get arrested.” A few heads lifted, including the shaved head of Ben Wilkes, a substitute Ed Tech who had a game of solitaire on his monitor.

  Wally handed me a slip of lime-green paper. “Totally legit,” he said, lowering his voice. “Don’t listen to her.”

  On the front of the paper, in a left-slanting hand, Wally had written Michael and Frances Murphy; 24332 Oriole Street; Conlin, Ohio. On the reverse, a phone number.

  “This can’t be right,” I said.

  With the patience of an iguana, Wally opened his notebook and showed me the checkmarks he’d made next to Michael Murphy’s unique and vital statistics. “Don’t even think about paying me,” he said. “I sort of consider myself as a public servant.”

  I could barely hear him over the rushing in my head. “Thanks,” I said. “My family will be thrilled.”

  Then Jenny chimed in. “I could’ve done it in half the time.”

  “As if,” Wally scoffed. I left them there, undersupervised and bickering, and it wasn’t until I returned to my office and p
ut the paper down and stared at it until my ears stopped thumping that I realized Wally Tibbetts and Jenny Morton were in love. Two overlooked creatures for whom, it would appear, love had not been designed, were in love anyway.

  I creased the paper into quarters, but it began to unfold itself, like a live, waking creature. I picked up the phone and put it down again. He had been the keeper of my dreams. My knight, my shield, my sanctuary. Also, he had erased my parents. Like the men who killed St. Bart, he skinned my parents beyond recognition and replaced them in my world. Every seed pushed into the earth, every pancake burned and re-tried, every bottle of Moxie drunk on the back steps in summer, every comfort and kindness left less of them and more of him. Then he, in turn, vanished into a vast and secret nowhere in which existed a person named Frances and an Ohio address.

  Filled with a yearning that preceded my conscious memory, I realized it was my parents, those fine, forgotten people who had loved me first, that I wished I could call.

  I needed my husband. “I’m leaving,” I said to Jane. “Tell Rick I’m taking another day.”

  “I’d be thrilled to,” Jane said. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  I left the building as if escaping a fire with nothing but the clothes on my back.

  Drew was taking pictures of babies. He didn’t trade much in babies, refusing to invest in bunting or pastel backdrops or stuffed rabbits in gingham overalls. Nevertheless, he got a few requests every month, which he fulfilled by cramming them all into a single day. The pain was more intense that way, he liked to say, but he preferred it to protracted torture.

  The eleven o’clock client—a pale, ovoid, bald, blue-eyed girl who looked to be about six months old and only distantly acquainted with the concept of sitting up—was propped on a rippling drapery of black velvet. Drew loved to turn babies into art; this one looked like an ostrich egg in a sixteenth-century still life.

  “‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war,’” he said grimly, as the camera whirred and the baby stared him down, “‘testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.’” The mothers, generally speaking, liked their babies to appear thrilled and cherished. Drew favored expressions of suspicion or downright disbelief, which he was getting in spades from this baby by reciting portions of the Gettysburg Address in a Rod Steiger baritone.