by Amber Sparks
Despite my spending so much time with her, Wendy was a ghost. She never had that solid feel, that reassuring weight of other kids’ mothers. Hollis used to call her Sister Wendy, but I always thought of her remove as more unscripted than liturgy, more faery than faithful. So far as I could tell, her religion had mostly to do with martyred saints and mystics, with women married to an unseen world.
Wendy had no need or desire for good little girls, only holy ones, which wasn’t quite the same. So I chose to live in her world, mostly. Somehow since birth I always knew this was my choice to make. I was wild, I was smart but impetuous, and possessed of a morbid collection of knowledge about torture and religious suffering. I understood Hollis, and his need for order, his love of modern things—but I chose to belong fully to my mother. Hollis was never somehow serious enough, you see, somehow always superficial in a way that offended me deeply. At dinner he would tell us stories, about him and my mother mostly, and he loved to tell jokes, though he labored to tell them. He wasn’t funny, Hollis, though you could tell he longed to be. He was just too punctual. Poor Hollis. So rational, so logical, so terribly male in the blandest, prettiest way. He was always behaving badly, though everyone thought I was too young to notice. He was having affairs—very efficient affairs—with several of the secretaries at Western Auto Parts Inc., and my mother was pretending not to notice. You might think that dry, sober Hollis was hardly the type, but my goodness, who better? Passion, indiscretion—these never factored in. Hollis kept his door locked and his stopwatch on, and though it made the women giggle, it got to be a sort of thing at Western Auto Parts Inc. Nobody quite knew if it was true—did he really keep a timer? The women who knew for sure weren’t saying.
Wendy told me some years later that he only did it because he could get away with it, and not because he didn’t love her. I think he thought it was something a real person might do, she said. Hollis was very concerned about trying to be a real person.
Oh, I know, I said. Hollis and I had that much in common. We were two people trapped in a strange dream, trying to behave from time to time as though we weren’t. For me it wasn’t so bad—I’d been born into the dream, after all. But Hollis, well. Hollis got a stopwatch for his sixth birthday, and ever since, he’d been obsessed with time. Not time as a concept, or time as in: running out of. Rather, time split up, allotted, doled out. Time parsed and measured. Time served.
One minute fifteen seconds: the length of time Hollis could hold his breath. (He had asthmatic lungs.)
One minute thirty-two seconds: the length of time it took him to brush his teeth (thoroughly and carefully).
One minute forty-three seconds: the length of time he could go without thinking about Julie Connor for that one long month in fourth grade before she moved to Lincoln.
Two minutes ten seconds: the length of time he thought his time was up after he fell through the ice on the lake in early spring.
Twenty-four hours: the length of time he was grounded after going out on the lake to play hockey after he’d been told not to.
One week: the length of time his coach kept him benched on the football team after he and his friends were caught stealing lawn ornaments from Mrs. Murphy’s Nativity display.
Eight months and fourteen days: the length of time Hollis took getting over the death of his high school sweetheart/chemistry teacher, Rolanda May, whom he was dating secretly.
Three years and nine months: the length of time it took Hollis to graduate from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a degree in business management.
Four years and six months: the length of time it took Hollis to work his way up the chain of command at Western Auto Parts Inc. to become the assistant regional manager.
Eight years and six months: the length of time Hollis and my mother were married before he first started cheating on her.
Twenty years and four months: the length of time Hollis and my mother were married before she put cyanide in his coffee.
SOMEDAY, THIS STUDIO will be mine. I’ve memorized it. I’ve come to love it drearily, in the way I suppose you’d find love in an arranged marriage, or a secondhand dress you didn’t pick out. Would you like the official tour? I get my stillness and strangeness from Wendy, but like Hollis I am a guide, an organizer. I gather, weave, divvy, and make a path for making meaning, through the detritus of Wendy’s faith and mine. I’ll show you what I mean.
We enter the small room through a plain wooden door—notice the strong smell? The artist burns holy incense—or, what she has purchased at the local head shop and deemed to be holy incense—whenever she is at work in her studio. She claims it helps her channel the spirits of the saints and unlock the secrets of their suffering. The artist’s daughter notes this channeling mainly involves taking long breaks to read Sontag and chain-smoking into a ceramic cross-shaped ashtray, but who can say what strange guises the muses may take on?
Notice also, please, the plain plum carpeting, thin in spots and worn through in others. The artist works simply, as a penitent would, and does not insist on fancy trappings in her humble working space. A straight-backed wooden chair, some scissors and glue in a Dixie cup, a cheap fiberboard table covered with sequins and fabric scraps from Michael’s, and tiny furniture from the miniature store—this is all the artist requires to complete her terrifying, ecstatic creations.
To your immediate right, our first exhibit: The Torture of Saint Catherine. You see here Catherine of Alexandria, the beautiful daughter of the king of Cyprus, in her prison cell being enthusiastically beaten with scorpions. Yes, well, those are actually tiny lobsters, not scorpions. It is very difficult to find scorpions in miniature, so you understand the artist must be inventive, flexible. That? White paint meant to read as dairy, since supposedly Catherine did not bleed red blood; her virginal veins spilled pure milk when she was tortured. The wheel? You see it outside the jail, waiting patiently for the martyr. The artist’s daughter—assistant—enjoyed gluing the metal spikes to the cardboard very much.
Continuing our tour: on this old bookcase we see the artist’s masterpiece, The Eyes of Saint Lucy. Lucy’s eyes were torn from her sockets after she refused to relinquish her virginity (a common theme in medieval sainthood), and she carries them on a satin pillow. Yes, those are the candy known as silver bullets, for cookie decorating, but see how cleverly the irises are painted on! See the red stain on the white satin! See the jailer, still in his Dollhouse Dad brown polyester pants, cruelly laughing as our poor Lucy’s soul prepares to spiral up to heaven! No great artwork arrives without suffering, and indeed for this particular piece the artist’s house nearly burned down, when she left the oatmeal on the stove one morning while she scrubbed Lucy’s yellow hair with Mane ‘n Tail to take out stray incense ash. It was worth it, though; the artist identifies most with this particular piece and has long claimed Saint Lucy’s power to see and unsee, heavenly vision a feast for her poor starved soul.
In the far corner, we can see what first appears to be a laser—red thread and wire—but is in fact the pain of Jesus on the cross, striking poor Saint Rita on the forehead with great violence. Fun fact: the artist’s daughter had the stomach flu when her mother told her about the large suppurating wound Rita would receive from her injury, and how grateful she was for it, and the artist’s daughter was never again able to eat properly in sight of uncovered injuries and sores.
Other dioramas you may walk about the room and observe: The Penance of Saint Pelagia, The Stigmata of Siena’s Catherine, and another highlight, Saint Agatha Having Her Breasts Hacked Off. There are also several paintings on the wall for you to enjoy and reflect upon, including Saint Joan on her pyre and the poor toothless Saint Apollonia.
Please do not touch the exhibits; these figures are not for play, as the artist’s children have been told time and time again. Nonetheless, we should admit an occasional saintly figure does make it outside to join in the holy wars of G.I. Joe and Barbie, or to serve as cannon fodder for the breaching of the Beamis
es’ windows.
The artist completes approximately one diorama every two years, though she did take a yearlong hiatus after her only daughter was born.
WENDY BOUGHT THE POISON the day Hollis brought home the Feral Boy, though she didn’t use it for a long time after. We called him Feral Boy, me and my brothers, because my father claimed he found him in a field out back of the auto parts factory, chasing buck naked after a corn snake. We thought that was the funniest thing we’d ever heard, and my brothers and I decided he must have been reared by wolves, like the boy in The Jungle Book. He was too little to know much or say much then, but my mother thought he looked an awful lot like Hollis and she said, all frost under her Virginia Slim, You expect me to raise that child?
Have a heart, said Hollis, and he held out his hands like a penitent. He’d come home from work early with the boy, so we knew it must be important. Hollis never left work early. His brown Buick coming up the drive, in need of a muffler, was a new sound this time of the afternoon, out of place and jarring as the Jaws theme. We all looked at the small boy clinging to my father’s legs. He had longish hair that stuck up in places, but otherwise he was disappointingly normal. Shorts and sneakers and shirt like the rest of us, sullen glare and shins covered with scrapes.
He’s not my brother, I said, and Wendy took my hand. Ours either, said my brothers, and they never stopped tormenting him after that, with pinches and punches and taunts and leaving-outs (the worst hurt of all).
He’s not anybody’s brother, said Hollis, tapping his watch nervously. He didn’t look at Wendy. The boy’s going to live with us, though, and we’ll treat him like family. Wendy dropped my hand and went inside without a word. No one saw her for a long week, and when she emerged, ash-stained blouse and one eyebrow raised, she had painted something and then burned it in a coffee can. She never even told me what it was. Then, she bought the cyanide from a jeweler, and she kept it in her studio for ten years, though I didn’t know about it until much later in the story.
Hollis promptly went back to work and started spending all his time there. He’d previously made it a point to be home by five, but now he stayed well into the evening hours. My brothers didn’t treat Feral Boy like family, of course, but since they usually went off by themselves those days, first gold in the morning to last wan light at night in summer, I was stuck with Feral Boy. He was so very beautiful and shy. I had to protect him at school from the bullies and leeches, boys and girls both, and it was exhausting work. He was prickly and defensive, and often got quietly angry. He held long grudges over nothing at all, and he never made any real friends but me. I loved him, though, in the end, since he was soul-wild like me. We would go out into the fields behind the factory, or the wood next to the crick, and we would build forts and faery mounds. We would sacrifice field mice to the pagan gods and try to summon up demon servants. We would dance in the rain until we were soaking, trying to outshout the thunder.
We would pretend we were married and old, like Hollis and Wendy. Do you suppose I’ll have affairs like Hollis? he would ask. If you do, I told him, I’ll kill you and bury you in the field where Hollis found you. That seemed to make him happy. FB never wanted any friends other than me, and I knew he was in love with me very early on. I knew I could be in love with him too, if I let myself, so I waited and put off deciding what to do about it until we were grown.
Wendy was forever trying to interest him in the saints, and she made him sit for a painting of John the Baptist once when we were in high school. You know, she told him, you were born of sin, like all men, and you must start atoning. Wendy had a way of being droll about the darkest sorts of things. It was never clear whether she was serious or not. She’d given up the Virginia Slims by then, but not the habit of speaking out of the corner of her mouth, and it gave her an odd air of ventriloquism. You might consider the priesthood, she said. Feral Boy, whom we called Michael sometimes at Wendy’s baptismal insistence, was horrified at the suggestion.
I want to go to Hollywood, he said. I want to be a famous actor. He was certainly lovely enough, all dark hair and gold eyes and graceful lean limbs. It was just us by then; my brothers had fled the suburbs for school, or for other suburbs in other cities. Hollis had become president of the Western Auto Parts company, and he never really came home again after FB. That suited Wendy just fine. She was working on what she hoped would be her finest creation yet: The Trial of Saint Joan. The scale was to be massive, since she planned to use our old He-Man action figures for the judges, and Malibu Barbie for the Maid of Orleans.
HOLLIS AND HIS FAVORITE JOKES:
On disabilities. Q: Why did the one-handed man cross the road? A: To get to the secondhand shop.
On existentialism. Q: What do you call a person with no body and no nose? A: Nobody knows!
On horses. Q: Why did the bartender give the Clydesdale a drink of water? A: Because he was a little horse.
On parenting. Q: What did the buffalo say to his kid when he dropped him off? A: Bison.
On sacraments. Q: How do you make holy water? A: Boil the hell out of it.
DESPITE HER INITIAL REVULSION, Wendy grew more attached to FB than to my own brothers. They were so male, unsentimental and practical, uninterested in my mother’s life or hobbies. They were equally indifferent to Hollis, and there was no pre-nostalgic sense they would be gone someday, because they already were. The elder talked of nothing but baseball, and the younger was a quiet blur; he couldn’t stay still for a moment. They did just well enough in school to do fine, and they were popular and well-liked and played a sport each season. Wendy and Hollis never went to a game, but that didn’t seem to bother my brothers at all. I played with them and tried hard to keep up, but when FB came along they receded, keeping their own counsel and circle. My mother was often angry at FB, who was dreamy to the point of exhaustion, but then again he was the only person on the planet who ever made Wendy smile. I didn’t know she could smile until FB; we always figured her face just wasn’t shaped that way. He could tumble about like a vaudeville actor, and sing like a sweet dazed dream, and his songs climbed up the smoke of Wendy’s incense while we three plaited yarn hair for the doll heads of martyred Christians and their pagan persecutors.
READING COMPREHENSION:
Which of us did Wendy love most?
Why did Wendy often get angry at FB, and why did she call him Michael?
Where did my brothers fly to?
Why didn’t my brothers take FB with them?
Should I have played a sport?
Should I have worked harder at making friends, less hard at protecting FB?
Was I sure, already, that it didn’t matter; sure that somehow I would end up like Wendy, shut in a smoke-filled room, worn beige carpets and doll limbs and lumps of putty heaped on tables?
Was I sure, already, that my own wildness would weird into Wendy’s—a hidden dark, full of shadows and blood and whispered confessions? That I, too, would be held captive by the same men who claimed to love my stray spirit?
Short Films for Feral Boy
Scene: Our sixth-grade classroom, where we wrote each other notes on paper that smelled like Wendy’s incense and Hollis’s cologne, coded to a frequency only we two could understand.
Scene: Wendy’s studio, where we tried to understand about the martyrs through the cigarette smoke and the paint and glue fumes, hazy with chemical feelings.
Scene: The parking lot of the local 7-Eleven, where we sucked up Slurpees and smoked cigarettes bummed from older kids and pretended to be panhandlers.
Scene: The swimming pool just down the road, where we lay on white plastic lawn chairs, wrapped in heat and sucking languidly on Pixy Stix and Dum Dums, occasionally doing cannonballs off the diving board into the deep end.
Scene: The scrubby field behind Hollis’s factory, where we built a secret place on the windiest stump of a hill with sticks and rocks and leaves, and kissed each other silly because we were beautiful and bored.
Scene: My up
stairs bedroom, where we lay pajama’d and chaste, side by side on my small ruffled bed, just like Tristan and Isolde.
Scene: The fancy party we snuck into, in the richer suburb next to ours. Where we crawled in through the open basement window, one of those old-fashioned ones with a crank and latch, and drank half a bottle of expensive scotch before they found us. Where we sat, in shame, on somebody’s spotless white leather sofa, and watched the police car park in the driveway to take us back to Hollis and Wendy. Where Hollis said I shouldn’t be running so free, and Wendy said it was your fault, and they both said they’d have to send you away, and I put my foot down in the middle of the new blue shag and said I’d follow you anywhere they sent you. The fight that followed, long and dreadful, when I said I loved you.
An Incomplete List of Saints Who Suffered from Stigmata
Saint Francis: wounds on feet, wrists, hands, and right side.
Saint Gemma: wounds and burning on hands, feet, and heart.
Saint Catherine of Siena: wounds on hands and feet, made invisible after prayers.
Saint Rita: a single thorn piercing her forehead, a suppurating wound lasting forever.
Saint Hollis: gouges made on hands and feet—just after death, just before the police arrived to take his wife, my mother, into custody.
BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD, my mother decided to play him, and the gods do love to watch the results of their own handiwork. My mother asked Hollis to stay home with her that day and, stunned, he drank his morning coffee and complied. Unfortunately for Hollis, he was the one-out-of-ten-people who can’t smell potassium cyanide. Wendy could. The faint odor of bitter almonds hung about Hollis even after he’d drained his cup (quickly and efficiently as ever). She told me later she was unwilling to use a gun, given her first marriage and years spent on the roof of the range. And she was sure Hollis would approve at least the efficiency of a massive dose of cyanide, sure to slow and stop the respiratory system and the heart quickly. She wasn’t prepared for the Prussian blue of his pop-eyed face, but as an artist she appreciated its aesthetic value.