by Kate Gray
Years ago I made my last confession. At St. Barnabas the confessional always smelled like bad breath. Opening the curtain gave enough light on dark wood and velvet to lead me to the kneeler.
After enough time for me to think of what to say, the window to Father Mortimer opened so fast and so loud I forgot. The shadows through the window showed him crossing himself. The ritual always kicked in.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” he said.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have not been to confession in eight months,” I said, even though it had been more.
It was ninth grade, and most of the kids were Episcopalians, and didn’t have to confess a thing. It was my mother who packed us into the VW van and marched us into the back pew on Saturday afternoons for confession. It was ninth grade, and most of the kids were pushing off the walls of the gym toward the dance floor during Saturday night dances and making out in the bushes outside. Many kids smoked pot, and I made up excuses why I couldn’t, like my dad would kill me, or my mom would know, or I had to go to church in the morning. None of the excuses sounded good enough for ninth grade.
Sometimes during the converted-gym dances with disco balls blinking, a few girls were left sitting. There was Mary Maguire, a field hockey player whose thick auburn hair defied the rubber bands she tried to tame it with. Mary cracked jokes in math class, winking at me when the whiskey-breath teacher tried to get us to believe in imaginary numbers.could not possibly be real, and recognizing something about adults gave us a secret, something separate from ninth grade, something ours.
One Saturday night Mary Maguire leaned back in the folding metal chair along the gym wall and stretched her long, halfback legs in front of her. And her short skirt ran perpendicular across the line of muscle down her thigh. In me there was something shivery when I looked, something that dropped down my throat, down my stomach, farther down.
That’s what I tried to tell Father Mortimer. I knew that something was bad, that girls shouldn’t like girls, that I might turn green and grow warts. This metamorphosis I believed to be possible from merely having such thoughts. The change on the outside of me was not complex; it was x causes y. The world would be able to tell by one look that I was bad, and being good was the most important thing.
“My child,” he said, “have you shared your feelings with your mother?”
A shock wave ran from my elbows to my knees. It was the electric fear of my mother sitting across the breakfast table, her eyebrow rising behind her bug-eye glasses, and it was also the hope that filled my lungs of talking to someone like Father Mortimer. I had saved this secret for him.
“No, Father.”
“Good,” he said. “Never tell your mother. Feelings for the same sex are expressly forbidden. Further, they are mortal sins and make you immoral. Ask God for forgiveness.” His voice was bigger than the bell in the church tower. This wasn’t the same priest who came for cocktails, the priest my mother called “Father M.”
“But Father M . . .”
“There is no room for you in God’s kingdom. Say two rosaries, and do not act on your feelings. For your own sake, child. For the Lord’s,” he said. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and he slammed the window.
That’s when I knew I was bad.
Bad has a taste and a color. It’s crimson, like the velvet in the confessional. And its taste is firm, a little sweet but bitter when it slides down your throat. Like beets.
One time walking away from Sarah’s room in college, the bile that rose in my throat was beets. The beginning of our senior year, I didn’t go to sleep without walking across campus to her room for a hug good night, Orion guiding me there.
In her dorm room, where stuffed animals crowded the bed and a cross hung above the bookshelf, when we rose and met each other in the middle of the room, held each other and swayed back and forth, one night she said, “You know, I can really understand why you fall for women.”
Inside, something sweet and bitter slid down my throat.
This was Sarah, the one who walked out junior year when I confessed my feelings for women. My Sarah whose body I matched in rowing, and otherwise didn’t dare notice. Mark’s Sarah, who called him every night after our hug.
The swaying stopped.
All I said was “Yeah, right,” and backed away. A shock wave stiffened my arms. The fear that all things good could be damned by Father M, and the faint hope that my love could be returned.
“No, really,” she said. “I get it.”
With Orion holding up the night sky behind me, I ran back to my room, the night the type of cold that breaks twigs from branches. The bitter red bubbled up. I tasted it.
That’s what was in my mouth when Mr. White hung up. Beets.
Song / What Makes
Good Luck
It’s very old. Maybe Korean. Maybe Chinese. Make origami figures of what the dead person didn’t have in life. Send those things with the body into fire, into the next world. You create good luck for the next time.
Young Mr. Harney, King of the Circling Lab Stools, once-twice, always-in-motion. Never was there a student like that student, always watching while being watched. Newton’s laws embodied: What is in motion stays in motion unless acted upon, something can only touch and be touched. Kyle was amazing. Was.
In the dorm the older boys must have snuck into his cubby after lights-out or during the day when I wasn’t there. The report said he had bruises on his back, on his triceps, on his hamstrings, places concealed by Tim-Tim’s clothes. What types of boys pick on the smallest one? What type of school protects the strongest ones?
The best paper I’ve been saving, the gold leaf on crimson, the royal blue swans, even the hand-painted cranes dancing, and the hokey stuff that Americans think is super special, the thin paper with Escher drawings, even the cheap brown package wrap. I take it all down to the dining hall. Those faces the same in the stupid Wyeth mural all stare at me with my armload of paper rolls sticking out, walking up to one of the round tables, where nobody’s sitting. Bending at the waist, I dump all the paper rolls and scissors and rulers on the table. Young Sirs and Madams of Breakfast stare at me.
There aren’t assigned tables at breakfast. It’s cafeteria style, and students grab a plastic tray, slide it along chrome rails, and the African American kitchen staff in their white uniforms and hairnets serve fat spoonfuls of grits or oatmeal or eggs. The world is different this morning, but not breakfast. An orange juice glass with ridges for little people with little hands is silly on the orange tray.
A spoon tapping on my juice glass stops the few conversations.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say to the masses, “good morning. After what happened last night, please join me in a ceremony.” All students turn toward me. “I invite you to fold origami cranes. The crane is a symbol of peace, and when someone dies, we place with the body the thing or things that person did not have in life. Mr. Harney did not have peace.”
Maggie Anderson raises her hand. Always the good girl.
“Yes, Miss Anderson.”
She puts her hand down, looks around before she says, “What’s origami?”
“I’ll show you. Please, anyone interested.”
The chairs skid on the floor. Students around the dining hall walk with slow steps. Maggie Anderson has pouches under her eyes, and her Irish skin is whiter than white. Shoulders are lower. This is shock.
Too much adrenalin in too-open veins, the students have flooded. They are fat with last night’s news. They are slow moving. Newton couldn’t calculate the total weight they bear. Not Cavendish.
“Take a piece of paper, or cut one from a roll,” I say. Students are two-deep to the table. They reach around each other and unfurl the rolls. There aren’t enough scissors. Usually students push each other around or make fun. This morning the world is different, and they wait.
“What size?” someone asks.
“Eight
by eight,” I say. “And then make a crease down the middle to mark the center, and diagonally fold down the right side of the paper toward the front.”
I make the folds and hold them up. Some students move to other tables but keep an eye on me. Some kneel and squeeze their arms in between bodies so they can use the table to crease the paper.
In a classroom demonstrating anything, I have to get their attention again and again. This morning in the world that is different, they don’t talk. Masters and mistresses of listening, they fold. Without washing hands, without wiping hands on napkins, the students and I fold. We are tables of students bent over, folding paper to bring peace to a student who had none.
My mother and father and I sat at the breakfast table in our house in San Diego the morning after Kim died. The Formica table had shiny specks that caught the sun. The packages of paper were out when I got up, and my mother and I started before my dad got his coffee and sat with us. We didn’t talk.
One folds what the dead didn’t have. Husband. Coins. Car. House. Diploma. Good job. Blood that didn’t clot.
How does one fold these things?
Give me enough time and paper, and I can fold anything.
A piece of royal blue paper with gold-leaf junks, twelve by twelve inches, and I made Kim the house she never had. Windows and doors and two floors. Houses are cake. My father made a chest full of coins. My mother made Kim’s boyfriend. A wicker basket filled with origami, and we sent the basket with her body for cremation.
Not so easy are cranes for hands not used to folding. The cranes come out bent and stupid.
Sixth Formers and Second Formers and Third Formers fold. Each student who can make one shows another who struggles. Carla walks in, her way of walking, improbable that her body stays upright, that her rowing is so smooth. Her body and her movements are part of the past, the force of negative equally balanced and repelled by the positive. By nature, since she is the student, she is the positive. By nature, I am the negative. I am the keeper of distance. She goes to another table, stands with her hands on her hips, and knows exactly what to do. Carla doesn’t look at me. Not once.
In the letters she folded into envelopes this summer, Carla wrote that she was my chair. Now she’s the crane in every kid’s hands. What would each kid say to her, the crane in their hands? What would each crane say to Kyle?
When Kyle asked me to teach him to fold, I was a fool. Mr. Crap-on-My-Career, jealous of a Second Former, a boy with a crush on an older girl. Kyle, on top of his notebook, his grubby hands folding boats and bats, we sat on the bench outside, overlooking the lake. I became something besides skin drag. I was teacher. Carla became student, the object of another student’s desire, the girl a boy wants to make origami for.
Two nights ago in study hall, Kyle folded the box with the message, “Meet me in the cornfield before dinner. Donny Zurkus.” And I went to the cornfield to see who thought Donny Zurkus would appear. Kyle had made a box, a bat, and bluebird. He signed them all “Donny Zurkus,” but it was Kyle who came to the cornfield in between fifth period and dinner.
Geese love the cornfield. I do not love geese. Messy birds. Poor flyers. When I got near the cornfield, the sun was low on the horizon, the angle of light not isosceles. The woods made elongated shadows into the fields. Carla was past the shadows.
It made sense. She and the geese are good for each other, awkward in movement, keen sense of surroundings. She walked into the middle of the field right past Kyle. Maybe she’s not as keen as the geese.
“Boo!” went Kyle, right behind her. She jumped and yelled, and Kyle clapped. Carla’s long arms folding across her front. The look on her face, sure to say, “Back off.”
They talked in the field. One girl went to a cornfield to find Donny Zurkus and found Mr. Different instead. She talked with her arms crossed in front of her. He brought out a magnifying glass from his jacket, hunched over, turned circles, and spied the ground. She came to the field and found a weird, little boy who had given origami gifts and had a crush on her.
Two bodies exerting force on each other until imbalance breaks their attraction. Whatever they said to each other, I couldn’t tell. He kept in motion the whole time, a moon around Jupiter. But then he broke orbit, bounced up and down. He pulled something besides the magnifying glass out of his coat. He tossed it up in the air, turned about-face, and ran from the field. His hands were up in the air, and he yelled something over and over. Carla stood there. She stood there in the middle of the field. Another person broke orbit from her.
After talking to Carla, Kyle came to study hall, Mr. Happy. After study hall, Kyle went off to off himself. That’s what he told me he would do. That’s what he did.
When Tommy Underwood and Maggie Anderson finish folding at the dining table, they drop the cranes into the basket in the middle. Grease on their hands from breakfast spot the origami. No matter. From the other tables, other students reach over and drop theirs in the pile. Everyone but Carla. Crimson and blue and yellow and brown cranes spill over the basket in the middle of the table. They make more, and the table fills with cranes, big ones, little ones, bent ones, crisp ones.
The only person missing, the person who makes perfect cranes, is Kyle.
Taylor / Breakfast
It was almost the end of breakfast time, and Terence hadn’t risen. His hands were still curled around the sheet pulled to his neck. His eyes were open and staring at the ceiling.
“Can’t I stay here?” he said without looking at me. His words were a surprise and moved up my spine where I stood at the foot of the bed.
“I wish you could,” I said.
“Don’t make me go back.”
“But you have to eat.”
“Not now.”
“I know, but try. You don’t have to go back to your cubby. Go back to the dorm, and ask somebody for clothes, okay? Your pajamas are cute, but school clothes are better.”
He tipped his head toward his toes, and his neck got thick. His smile was part boy, part old man, and his eyes were still windows without light.
“I’ll meet you in the dining hall.” My hand was big over the blanket covering his foot. A few steps down the hall, and the door pressed into place on my way out.
The way into the dining hall was the far end. Students were two-deep around tables by the mural. The dining hall was quieter than it had ever been. The laughs of the kitchen workers and the clatter of dishes loading into the washers broke the quiet. No students cracking up. No students yelling to each other. No talk at all.
Jack Song was at one table, Carla at another. Everyone bent over something. Carla’s curls fell down. She didn’t see me.
If I went to her right now, I could tell her not to meet me after breakfast. If I called her away from the table, I could tell her it was wrong to kiss her. If she knew how bad I was, she wouldn’t meet me after breakfast.
But I didn’t go to her.
Outside a window on my end of the dining hall stood a large person with a pink shirt. Outside was a covered walkway of stones going this way and stones going that way.
Alex Jeffers was bent over, holding on to the railing of the stairs, students passing him, not stopping. All six feet, five inches of muscle-bound Alex Jeffers were shaking in that covered hallway outside. One hand across his forehead covering his eyes, his huge hand making his head look like a child’s, he was crying. He leaned into the stone wall, one of his feet on a higher step than the other. Students stared as they passed him. Nobody stopped.
This was the man who followed me into the ladies’ room at the first faculty party, who held me after Sarah drowned. This was the big man who turned boy rowers into champions, the man who tried to save Kyle.
“Alex,” I said. I stopped on a stair above him.
He looked up, and his hand slid from his eyes to his mouth. His big hand couldn’t stop the high notes leaking from his mouth. His eyelashes were red rims and water caught thick. Terror was stuck in his eyes.
“Come
here,” I said, and I stepped into him. He tried to speak, but high notes came out instead. My arms went wide around him, and I held him for all that he had seen, for all he couldn’t do. I held him for all I couldn’t do. Students passed us and pretended not to see.
I held him to keep from being bad.
Song / The Science of Loss
Carla at a separate table folds paper one way, makes diagonals, folds the bottom points to make a tail. Just so. Ms. Adept. Even two tables over and most of the other students gone, I see her open up the left and right sides, fold down the wings and pull up the head and tail. She learned from me. While students with untrained fingers mangle their cranes, the crimson and gold crane rises from two dimensions to three in her hands. She doesn’t toss it in the basket. In her palm the crane is crisp and bright.
She walks out the dining hall door by the creepy-boy mural. The few students left are busy, heads bowed. I catch the door out of the dining hall before it swings shut.
“Wait, Carla.”
She stops so fast the forward motion keeps her head moving forward; then it bobs back. No force but the force of her will resists the momentum.
“I don’t hear you,” she says.
“Fine,” I say, “but don’t go.”
“Because why?”
“Because I saw you with Kyle.” Carla straightens her back. The crane rests in her hand, palm up.
“So?”
“So, I’m wondering how you’re doing,” I say. Two meters behind her, I am the distance from the earth to the moon away.
“Now you wonder?” She spins around. “Now you wonder. Does someone have to die before you talk to me?” Her face is red, and her curls bounce right to left.
“In here,” I say and take her shoulder in my hand. She jerks her shoulder away and takes straight-legged steps into the classroom. The chairs scrape the floor. We sit facing each other. Carla crosses her arms across her front. She’s the sitting-down version of the standing-up Carla after Kyle said “Boo!” in the cornfield.